Google Meet holiday small talk ban

Hello all, I hope you had a wonderful holiday break. This last weekend was my first time taking a weekend off in two years, and let me tell you, it was AWESOME. I’ll be doing this every weekend and couldn’t be more excited.

That being said, the holidays are over, and it’s time to return to work. This week,, many of us will have calendars crammed full of meetings where we start to discuss all the things we inevitably weren’t able to cover before the break. These conversations regularly include performative small talk, “How was your break?” that most people go through the motions of but likely aren’t super keen on.

This got me thinking… what if the software we use normalized getting back to business? You can imagine a Google Meet feature where people are automatically muted and warned if they start veering into small talk. If they repeatedly do this, they’re booted from the call.

Sure, small companies that are a “family” wouldn’t like this, but at the end of the day, business is business and people are at work to do a job. This would never get shipped for a ton of reasons, but something to keep meetings on track would likely be appreciated by many.

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