Screen Share Desktop Cleanup Has Entered Formal Review
The practice of clearing one's desktop immediately before sharing a screen in a meeting has been documented and is now under formal review by no one in particular.
Screen Share Desktop Cleanup Has Entered Formal Review
The meeting invitation said "you'll be presenting the Q4 summary" and she had confirmed attendance without asking for more information because she had not wanted to appear underprepared by asking what preparing would require.
She found out what preparing required four minutes before the meeting began.
She had eleven tabs open, four of them personal, and approximately thirty seconds to decide which of her open applications told a story she was prepared to tell in front of seventeen people. The Q4 summary was in a tab. The tab was findable. The other ten tabs were findable too, which was the problem.
She closed the tabs that were irrelevant to work. She minimized the applications that were relevant to work but not to this specific work. She moved three files off her desktop. She moved them into a folder named "desktop stuff" that existed for this purpose and contained a previous occasion's worth of desktop stuff beneath this one.
The cleanup took two minutes and forty seconds. She joined the meeting thirty seconds late.
During the screen share, one of the seventeen people asked a question that required her to open the application she had minimized. She opened it. She had minimized the correct window within the application but left a second window open. The second window was visible briefly. Nobody commented on it.
The desktop she shared was clean. The desktop she worked from was not. Both desktops belonged to her, which was a fact she chose not to examine.
After the meeting she restored the minimized applications. She left the "desktop stuff" folder closed. She did not move anything back to the desktop. She considered whether this meant she did not need those files on the desktop, or whether it meant she had grown accustomed to their absence during the meeting and would eventually find them in the folder during a later cleanup pass and not remember what they were.
She had a second meeting in twenty minutes. She left the desktop as it was.
She thought, briefly, that she should create a more permanent version of the desktop she had just staged, since she clearly found it more functional for presenting purposes.
She closed the browser tab where she had been looking up something during the Q4 summary, because it was still open and she no longer needed it and it was the kind of tab that should be closed.
It was a recipe. It had nothing to do with the Q4 summary. The Q4 summary had gone fine.