Archive for the ‘forums’ tag
productivity
In this day and age, I’m sure many readers are aware of mass forwarding emails between groups of friends to pass the time at work. It’s a pretty nifty way to organise dinners, talk about the weekend, and generally help the day go by just that much quicker.
I hated it. Nothing was worse than sitting with your email reader open and having tens of emails flood into your inbox. I despised reading through the millions of signatures, the security and privacy disclaimers, the broken layouts, the shitty attachments; everything about it just sucked. I recall a situation where one of my mates was such an active emailer that he was put on notice for having more emails than anyone else in the entire organisation, including executives. It’s a problem when you’re officially put on notice by the IT department. I was worried that one of us was going to get an official warning or worse due to the vast quantity of emails flying back and forth, but our sociability precluded us from trimming it down.
Took a while to get it configured, but we ended up settling for a forum, much like what you would see at Whirlpool or Overclockers Australia, which would turn out to be the focal point for all of our productivity-destroying worktime conversations today. People can log in/out as they like, a historical record is fully maintained, people can drop in on conversations and pick things up intuitively and most notably, your inbox stayed clean. No longer would we be subject to the tyrannies of the corporate Postmaster who has told the CIO that your inbox is pushing several hundred objects more than his own. It was perfect.
After some initial resistance to the idea (it took a fair while before everyone came on board) the forums are now the centrepiece of working days. I think I’m serving well over 1Gb/month of traffic alone from that domain, which is considerable when you realise that 90% of the data is simple text and html. Over 750 topics and 17500 posts, since its launch in mid 2007, it’s still humming along nicely. Let’s hope it doesn’t kill too many billable hours in the days to come.