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Is This Meeting Swab-Worthy?
How to know when it’s worth going into the office — or getting on a plane
As offices tentatively re-open, events resume, and people start getting on airplanes again, we will have to start evaluating which clients, meetings and events are worth doing in-person and which can be done as well (or perhaps even better) as remote meetings or as no meeting at all.
It’s part of the strategy that we refer to in Remote, Inc. as “punctuated collaboration”: Making smart use of digital tools so that you can take meetings when they’re necessary, rather than as the default way of getting things done.
Choosing the meetings that matter
Here’s the standard I’d like to propose for deciding what to book: Is this meeting swab-worthy?
It’s a standard inspired by my first trip across the US/Canada border, which I have documented in excruciating detail for anyone thinking of crossing the border or just curious about what America looks like after an 18-month break. My 13-hour shopping trip to Whole Foods, Target and Trader Joe’s required not one but two rounds of Covid testing, neither of which was fun, and both of which were pretty time-consuming. (The pre-entry test took a lot of time to arrange, and the arrival test took quite a bit of time at…