Canaries love graphs. When you see them staring lovingly at their own mirrored reflection it isn’t narcissism, oh no, they are actually celebrating their comparative life expectancy, no doubt conjuring up a small bar chart with two columns, one peaking at 2yrs the other at 20 years. Which is best? Yup the cage is king.
Energy is an odd feeling, it varies by age of course, but it also varies by task and by who you are with. The feeling of energy you get from a great conversation makes time fly past, but sadly so does the reverse when you are being bored to death, time almost stops entirely.
So all the Meeting Canaries gathered together and mused how you might measure energy in online meetings. We could all take a decent guess at how you might do this, how many people are speaking, how long is the monopod (sorry doing it again, I mean monolog), is lexical density reduced (I’m so bored now I shall start using fewer, simpler words…) etc etc.
So we took all these etceteras and made an equation that analyses, in real time I might add, energy scores in meetings and we threw that out into the wild and waited a bit.
And here’s the thing, when you have massive amounts of data on energy scores in meetings, and we have literally millions of minutes of such stuff, you can start to look at what happens in meetings over time, does energy decline with time? Well yes, it jolly well does and here’s the bloomin’ truth of it:
Meeting Canary can prove that energy declines roughly around the 1 hour mark, ‘no sh*t, Sherlock’ I hear you cry out, but there is something else we can show as well; you know those meetings that go on beyond their allotted time? We especially dislike those ones, but here’s another graph to make any canary happy:
Turns out if you extend the meeting after the supposed end energy levels fall off a cliff, and that’s happening at 1 hr whether it’s 30, 45 or the full 60 minutes.
So next time you start to fall off your perch – know that your feathered friend has your back – and let the meeting organiser see the data consequence of their overly long or overly late action. Then get back to your mirror and wonder how you will make use of those extra 18 years of life…..