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At what point, when a meeting drags long, can we start griping?

1 points by TurkishPoptart ↗ HN
Sometimes managers schedule team meetings for an hour at a time. What is the appropriate time and way to say, "hey, this is keeping me from doing my work"? When they drag on to 90 minutes?

I am new to this organization, and am not used to these long team meetings. I suspect half the other attendees are just multi-tasking anyway (emails). Yet I suspect they are not proactive enough to reach out to the manager about this. Has anyone successfully got a manager to re-think their meeting scheduling?

4 comments

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willcate
I'm hard-core about the 1-hr limit. If it hits 65 minutes, I'll glance at my phone, then look at the folks (or the camera) and say "Woops, sorry... gotta go." If you can do this w/o getting fired (at the risk of belaboring the obvious), you should.
dieselgate
Don't have specific advice/experience on getting a manager to re-think meeting scheduling. But the Org I work at, for meetings, makes any "unscheduled overflow" time optional. So you can just say "gotta drop thanks" if there's a conflict when things run over. Meetings should have a purpose and scope anyway so if this is an issue it sort of seems to be an issue with scheduling for the manager or whoever. Even so, people will probably always gripe about meetings. Good luck, hope you can find a resolve here
ano-ther
I would spend those wasted minutes by observing what’s happening - which agenda items are helpful, where does it drag on, are there patterns of who talks all the time etc.

Then bring up those observations politely at your next 1:1 with your manager, ideally with a suggestion of what and how to make the meeting more valuable to your work.

prirun
When I was doing contract work and a manager asked to join in meetings, I would say "I can come for xx minutes - 15, 30, whatever seemed reasonable to me based on the topic. If the discussion was productive, I might stay longer. Most of the time, the discussion was pointless and I'd leave. The worst was standing meetings (recurred every week at the same time). The agenda hardly ever changed and not much of anything ever got done, other than discussing the same list of problems every week.

Long team meetings are a total time suck.

Edit: you could just leave after it gets stupid, and if asked why, tell them you had another meeting! If you just leave, how do they know you're not having a "bathroom emergency"? Sounds like a good excuse to me. And if you do it enough that they press you on it, it seems reasonable to say "I didn't have anything more to contribute to the discussion so I thought my time was better used working on my current project." Seems a manager would be hard-pressed to argue with that.