This blog post is part of my Personal Coronavirus Challenge where I write about remote working and facilitation every day for as long as the imposed quarantine lasts with the intent to get into the habit of writing regularly and (hopefully) getting better at it.

It’s been now nine days since me and my colleagues are working from home and I’m observing one major but unnecessairy change in our work behaviour:

Meetings tend to last longer than scheduled

It’s nice not being kicked out of the meeting room by the participants of the next meeting and instead stay in our virtual meeting room and finish the discussion. If this happens once, fine. But if this gets the new standard, you should stop it. If you are leading the meeting, make sure to start on time and stop on time so people can go back to work. And if you are a participant, speak up and ask to close the meeting.
Also, virtual meetings are more energy draining than in-person meetings. Generally try to focus and keep meetings short, preferably below one hour. One easy way to do this is using the free version of Zoom, as you are not able to hold meetings longer than 40 minutes. To me this sounds like the perfect remote meeting duration!