What do you do in a dull teleconference?

Like many people these days I spend a lot of time on teleconferences these days. The thing with teleconferences is that the level of involvement can often be very low. You need to be sitting listening and adding value when required, but the involvement can often be low enough to enable you to do another activity. There is something about teleconferences which make them particularly poor at time keeping (perhaps it’s because we are all doing something else as well).

You can’t do something requiring a lot of thought, ideally it is something you can leave and come back to with ease. There are, therefore, a number of things that I find myself doing while on a teleconference.

One of the things that I do is to browse flickr pictures in the groups that I am interested in. I particularly like to look through sunsets and sunrises, or UK pictures.

It’s also a good time to catch up on feeds that don;t really need reading. It’s surprising how many of these there are. There are loads of feeds where it’s sufficient to know that it exists, a prime example of this is the Microsoft Download feed. I don’t get an RRS feed for news because there is too much of it, so I also spend some time looking at the BBC News site.

Every now and again someone will send me a silly game to play. My attention span for these things is not very high. The latest one pokes a bit of fun at Steve Ballmer and his (reportedly) throwing a chair at news of one of his employees leaving to join Google. I can’t do games like the Pit Stop Game because that requires my attention, and part of my brain is still listening to the teleconference.

I have, from time to time, also used the time to sort through my task list.

The other thing I do is to write blogs.

I have considered whether it would be possible to do some exercise while sat listening but concluded that it would be difficult to sound calm and convincing while riding an exercise bike.

The question I am not particularly clear on is whether this actually adds to or removes from my productivity.