I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday. Here at TOPP Labs, we're doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we're doing re: professional goals outlined in the annual reviews.  So, today and Monday, I'll be having 20 30-minute meetings, each followed by 15-minutes of write-up time by me.  That's kind of a lot to schedule. Here's how it went down:

1) First, I cleared my schedule for today and Monday. 2) "Hmm, I guess I need to ping each person to see when they can meet up.  Ugh.  Time to procrastinate." 3) "Since I'm out of the office today, it will be super annoying to email every single person from my phone.  I'll just write one email to the team list and have each person email me back times that work for them.  Nice.  Offloading the work." 4) "Wait!  Even better, I'll just ask everyone to add their own appointments to the team Google Calendar.  Now we're talking."

So in the end, I just had everyone schedule their own meetings on a first come, first served basis.  Kind of empowering to just let other people schedule two whole days for me.  Plus, the communication overhead went from a lot to zero.  Yay for crowdsourcing.

I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday. Here at TOPP Labs, we're doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we're doing re: professional goals outlined in the annual reviews.  So, today and Monday, I'll be having 20 30-minute meetings, each followed by 15-minutes of write-up time by me.  That's kind of a lot to schedule. Here's how it went down:

1) First, I cleared my schedule for today and Monday. 2) "Hmm, I guess I need to ping each person to see when they can meet up.  Ugh.  Time to procrastinate." 3) "Since I'm out of the office today, it will be super annoying to email every single person from my phone.  I'll just write one email to the team list and have each person email me back times that work for them.  Nice.  Offloading the work." 4) "Wait!  Even better, I'll just ask everyone to add their own appointments to the team Google Calendar.  Now we're talking."

So in the end, I just had everyone schedule their own meetings on a first come, first served basis.  Kind of empowering to just let other people schedule two whole days for me.  Plus, the communication overhead went from a lot to zero.  Yay for crowdsourcing.