Note to self 010 - Parkinson's law strikes - again!

It may not sound very nice, but the sad fact is that people tend to use up the available time for a task in a lot of situations. Therefore: If you want to be over with the meeting in 30 minutes send out an invitation for only 30 minutes - if you make it 45 minutes in the invitation it will take 45 minutes.

Parkinson's original quote from 1955 is:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law

Note to self 009 - it's called Hanlon's razor

And it goes: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Although sometimes Heinlein's Razor or Napoleon's unnamed version of it seem more appropriate...

Heinlein's razor:
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, but don't rule out malice

Napoleon's unnamed epigram:
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Notes to self - 005, Get it in writing - even if you have to put it there yourself

As I wrote a while back it is always a good idea to get important agreements in writing - Today I just had to remind myself that - especially in these days of electronic communication - there is always the option to put it writing yourself.
As a last resort - e.g. if an official protocol would be taken as an offense - I take the tangential approach as in "When we agreed on we also mentioned - would it be OK for you to treat these separately?" thus getting a written - and circulated - record of without offending my negotiation partner.
I most cases though it should be quite OK just to communicate openly and agree on putting the agreements in writing just to make sure that there are no misunderstandings.

Notes to self - 002, Keep Records! Measurement & Calculation beats guesswork

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Sometimes I have to reminded myself to "eat my own dogfood" (or "take my own prescriptions")

Why should I not apply the same principles to facilitation that I recommend for software development?
Yesterday's Weather is perfectly applicable to meeting facilitation - if you know your tasks.
It's rather a high probability that the same task with the same amount of people in a retrospective (e.g. gathering data via a FrIm Chart) will take more or less the same amount of time.
So - to develop a plausible agenda - it's helpful to record the time each task took and the relevant circumstances (Time of day, number of participants etc.)
Therefore: Keep Records!
In the case of retrospectives you get a very sound foundation base your planning on data instead of guesswork very quickly. I'd say 3 Iterations should gauge your instruments [for that team] pretty precisely.

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