Ideas for the workplace

There hasn't been much inspiration for blogging. Perhaps its the whole routine and the fact that I'm not actually procrastinating from doing anything. When you've got something to do and you don't want to do it, you (or at least I) will always find something else to occupy your time instead of the thing you're supposed to do.

It helps that I haven't had to take work home to do - so I'm not blogging instead of doing work. It helps.

Anyway, onto the whole point of this post!

Once you've been in the office world a little while, you start to notice some things. One of these things is the number of 'buzzwords' people use these days. You know, your conventional office would have phrases such as 'Go Live!' dates, 'steering committees', project 'charters', and a seemingly infinite number of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) to cover just about every aspect of anybodys life they could ever think of.

The other thing some of you will notice is that people have a lot of meetings. As one of our glorious directors said the other day: "Feeling lonely? Call a meeting. Don't want to make a decision? Call a meeting." It pretty much sums up the productivity experienced during these meetings. I found out the other day that a number of these so called 'tax meetings' took about 5 and half hours. I think there were about 10 people in this meeting. To me, any meeting longer than half an hour turns into doodling with pen and pad. I just had a look at my notebook the other day, and its not pretty. The doodles tend to be figures of demonic monsters with associated angry scribbles and pagan symbols (okay so I made up that last part but you get the idea).

One of my colleagues at work came up with the great idea of combining both the buzzwords and meetings to create a fun game for all! This idea is by no means original, and it only applies old ideas to new situations - and in some ways readies you for the retirement village.

In a word, its Bingo! Just before your next big meeting, organise with you and your workmates a list of 10 or so different buzzwords your workplace normally bandies about on a regular basis, write them down on a piece of paper in random locations, and photocopy a few. Just before the meeting, distribute the list to a select few.

Now during the meeting, as soon as one of the buzzwords comes up, cross it off your list. First one to get all the words crossed off shouts "Bingo!" As a reward, no action items from the will be assigned to the winner.

Rules:
- No bingo participant is allowed to say any of the words on the sheet, if they do, they are automatically disqualified and their words do not count.
- Management must be present
- Highlighters are permitted
- Chairs of the meeting are also permitted to join
- Challenges to mentioned buzzwords must occur during the meeting
- At least one meeting attendee must be unaware of the game