Got fed up with 36 hours of weekly meetings. Built something to fix it
A buddy of mine had the same issue and wanted to try to do something about it. We did months of research on meetings, which was actually pretty interesting and revealing. Both of us having analytical backgrounds, traced the issue back to a main root cause: unprepared meetings. Call it breaking it down to its first principles. We also realized that many meeting softwares were actually focusing on the wrong problem.
Some interesting stats we found: 65% of meeting owners never prepare. Also, only ~30% of meeting attendees found the meetings they attended impactful, despite ~80% of owners thinking otherwise. A clear gap.
The core issues we identified were:
- Lack of agendas, talking points, and objectives - Excessive participants, often unnecessary - Absence of structure and clear outcomes - No feedback to meeting owners
We tested this finding out ourselves in our meetings by:
- Establishing a single defined objective (i.e. what we want to leave the meeting with hitting) - Articulating thoughtful talking points well ahead of time - Limiting attendees to those with assigned talking points (max 3-4 people per meeting) - Asking for honest meeting feedback from our attendees - Politely declining unnecessary meetings, including 1:1s
The result after only 1-2 weeks: A remarkable 10-hour reduction in weekly meeting load, giving me back an entire workday and eliminating the need for evening and weekend work.
It was pretty wild how well this worked, but the key to keeping it this way was consistency.
We asked our colleagues and friends if they had similar issues with meetings and were astonished how common this was. SOO.. we developed an in-calendar tool that makes meeting preparation as simple as practicably possible. This tool streamlines the creation of crisp, structured agendas with impactful talking points, ensures only necessary people are invited, and makes it easy for attendees to provide feedback to meeting owners --- all of this in less than 2 mins.
**Check it out in action here: https://www.loom.com/share/d241273abef4418597ba3af3ab46e323
To the Hacker News community: Do you also struggle with heavy loads of unproductive meetings? Do you find meeting preparation is the best way to improve bad meetings? What else do you do to help yourself and others with improving unproductive meetings? We're trying to prioritize what features we should build next. We have many ideas, but want some collective input.
Suggestions welcome!
51 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] threadIt is if they’re being entirely booked with meetings.
If I were OP, I’d absolutely bring this up to my manager, but I wouldn’t simply just acquiesce and work nights/weekends just to keep up. Time management is only on me if I’m given a chance to complete my tasks in the allotted time —- if I’m not given the time, that’s the company’s fault, not mine.
I also decline meetings with no agenda and let the organizer know I declined due to the lack of agenda.
Even so, I've seen people focus on running good meetings. And it does help quite a bit, so I wouldn't discourage your direction at all. But you should also maintain an awareness that the most efficient meeting is one where it is never needed in the first place.
Any tool should start by asking "Could this meeting be an email, Slack message, a poll or a shared document?". Maybe even go further and ask why, so at the end of the month people can check if the reasons given really made sense.
I will also add that I was surprised when I got to be an adult how few people "do their homework" so to speak - the problem you have identified here. It's funny, as a kid, I mostly didn't do my actual homework because it was mostly pointless teacher-pleasing if you understood the concepts well enough, but now that I've grown up (at least a little bit), I actually want to be prepared.
At my current job, they actually printed out my resume and referred to it when they interviewed me; a practice that I picked up myself years ago, but have rarely seen others do. Just one example, but it showed a culture that actually believes in preparation which has carried through into other examples. Also, we don't have that many meetings lol.
Thinking about the tools I use, there's not currently one that can be avoided so easily. The biggest tools I use now are GitHub, IDE, Slack, and GSuite.
The broader point was that yes, meeting discipline can be achieved by just sticking to certain practices. But a tool systematizes these practices and make them easier to implement. This is the reason we use most tools, even though we know that it is technically possible to survive without them (even if it would be very difficult).
Have people prepare, sure. Cut down on un-necessary people, sure. Focus the meeting on one thing, which leads to shorter meetings, sure. But best of all, don't have the meeting if you can help it. Only have a meeting for what you can't do by email (or can't do without major inefficiency).
https://i.redd.it/so93iqdrqv311.jpg
So if a company only left me with 4 hours per week because of meetings, then whose fault is that? Certainly not mine.
Don’t think like an engineer with a few meetings and lots of prep time. Think like super busy people who have no prep time available. Or at least that your meeting isn’t a high enough priority to warrant them prepping.
If you wait until the beginning of the meeting to prepare, there is an extremely high risk that someone else in the room is prepared to eat your lunch. Don’t surrender the initiative by being lazy.
Fwiw I bet Bezos pre-reads plenty of memos and I doubt very much that his is lazy. The point stands.
It failed because key stakeholders just wouldn’t read the memo and I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work. Sadly, there was no autocratic power forcing the process.
So it ended very frustratingly with people asking questions in the memo and asking for a summary presented to them.
The memos were really helpful for product design so I still use the technique but just as a design reference for building.
The whole point of the method is to address the premise that you cannot rely on people to read documents in advance.
To me, the problem is a mix of talent & culture. Our "people" team heard all of the feedback and always vowed to fix communications/meeting culture with presentations and notion guides, but nothing ever happened because the root cause is simply a combination of poor talent and bad leadership that doesn't uphold strong values around effective communication.
Tools like these are just slapping lipstick on a pig most of the time, because if your folks don't care, none of the ratings you've implemented or any of these "agenda items" are really going to do anything if people aren't actually abiding or care. It's like using Jira or whatever pjm software you have. It can be the most powerful thing, but your feature tickets are a direct function of how well someone writes them and cares about writing them.
The only time I've ever noticed a good meeting culture, is by having fewer people work at a bloated org, having more focused teams via a sane org structure, and less types of folks who operate on a premise that they're productive because they've attended X meetings and answered Y slack messages, and really serious leaders who can shut someone up and move on to something else and call a meeting early because it's truly over. If you don't have folks like these, no amount of gcal addons or plugins will fix this IMO.
Do you think that starts with a few empowered individuals in the working ranks, top-down leadership, or is it impossible to pivot?
I've noticed I've emboldened some of the quieter devs I work with as well to skip the bullshit meetings, and it's nice checking people's calendars and seeing a LOT more focus time and auto-decline timeslots than before.
I think some of these meetings might be important enough to warrant having one occasionally, but not as an almost-daily phenomenon.
Any similar experiences? I'm not in the software dev/engineering world so I'm not as well informed in the matter; however I'd be very surprised if a majority of people would accept such working conditions that are very adverse to a healthy work-life balance.
What do you all think is a starting point to facilitate that cultural shift? How do you start getting the right behaviors started in the easiest way possible?
Before the start of the meeting, the agenda part needed to be filled in. At the end, a table with actions, including who ... does what ... withvdeadline .... needed to be filled in.
If you were new or he suspected something, or just randomly, he'd enter your meeting and ask the doc. Or mail someone after the meeting and ask for the actions/decisions. Or at a deadline, he'd ask how an action worked out. As long as you could answer something reasonable, all was well.
It worked well, and I learned a lot from him.
meetrics.ai
OR try it directly from the Chrome Webstore on your Google Calendar:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/meetrics/nddolgdejk...
* Rejected any meeting without a note that was booked in without me knowing what it was
* Rejected any meeting without a note that double booked me
* Rejected lunch time meetings
* No showed reoccuring meetings where I thought I wouldn't be missed. Sent my apologies most of the time.
* Set up meetings for myself in my calendar to do specific work
I never heard any complaints either from people or to my manager. I think people set up meetings as the easiest path. Since they're looking for the easiest path they're not going to put up a fight if you push back.