Every Friday at Viget we gather for a company-wide meeting and lunch (brunch for our Boulder folks) and during that time one of us delivers a short presentation on a relevant topic. We call it a Labshare -- a humble routine indicative of the value we place on sharing and educating. A more formal example: our quarterly, public Google Analytics training. Whether it's buttoned up or strictly casual, we always look for opportunities to share and learn, particularly during the course of our client work. Pairing our deliverables with durable skills means our clients walk away with more value than can be detailed in a Task Order.

As someone who has been a professional software developer for quite some time, I often joke that each year I hate technology more and more. I'm not going to "check in" on Foursquare, won't ever use a daily deal, don't do Facebook, and finally deleted my LinkedIn account last year. I'm not swearing off all technology, though — I use Twitter in place of RSS and Strava to track my rides. I believe in the selective application of technology — any tool or service I decide to use must provide some perceivable value.

I like to apply this same philosophy to my professional work environment. Now that the Viget team is spread across three locations, there are tools and services that help us communicate across offices. Having a laptop on-hand is definitely part of our strategy for having an effective distributed workforce. This, too, is a double-edged sword. I've seen instances where having a laptop in a meeting can quickly connect people across offices, allow someone to perform some rapid on-the-spot research, and even be an effective tool in a remote interviewing situation.

However, as useful as this technology can be, I've also witnessed how quickly it can derail an otherwise productive meeting. Here are three reasons why I think laptops can be meeting poison:

As part of Boulder Startup Week, Viget hosted a moderated panel session, How Startups Get to Great Design. With over 150 people in attendance, this event built upon the success of our 2012 event Startups + Great UX = Great Success.

This year’s event brought together designers from agencies and product companies to discuss what works for startups when going through a redesign. The session was valuable, with moderator Jackson Fox doing an excellent job of keeping the topics on track and making sure each panelist had a chance to speak to their experiences.

Search keyword analysis for analytics has always felt more painful than necessary. Such analysis typically involves filtering through hundreds or thousands of subtly-different variations of search queries to form an impression of the relative importance of particular words and phrases. It's a time-consuming and often subjective process that isn't any fun at all.

Since current analytics services lack a tool to digest raw search query data into a list of the most important words, we built one fit for the task.

As project managers (PMs), we’re conditioned (often early in our careers) to exercise control over a long list of variables in order to drive a project to successful completion. It’s commonplace to hear specificity like, “designing this comp should take 4 hours; we’ll get client feedback in 2 days; and we have to deliver the 6 comps described in the contract.” The prevailing view is that project management entails perfection -- and that perfection requires to-the-letter execution. The reality, however, is very different. Projects are made up of people and require creative problem solving. And since people aren’t perfect and creativity is often a complex exercise, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that projects are therefore full of imperfections. While many of us come to this realization eventually, we need to do so more quickly. Actively embracing project management as an imperfect science will help us be better at it. As the saying goes, “perfect is the enemy of good.”