Seems like solid advice indeed, I'm going to try and stick to these guidelines, too often meetings could have been an e-mail or bit of text and take too long.
This seems good from the attendie’s point of view. I would love a similar post on the culture for calling meetings. There are too many “I don’t want to make an effort to understand/solve issue X so I’ll just create a meeting with everyone who might have an interest so we can all spend 1h talking about if the issue is an issue at all, and if it’s an issue what do we do about it”.. makes me so tired.
At my ex employer, every employee had an hourly rate in the system, I had thought of pulling the rates from the internal system into Microsoft teams, to display the cost of every meeting.
I (unsuccesfully) tried to make that point before: "You just spent $2000 of paid employee time for a meeting that achieved nothing but we don't have the money to spend $1000 on licenses for X". Didn't work
"Meeting cost calculator" where the cost of the meeting would tick up in real time on the wall.
IIRC the idea was to have everyone tap their keyfob on a reader and it'd get everyone's hourly salary from a database and start counting the price by the minute.
this feels like advice for the person running the meeting, not the one being dragged into it. I'm just picturing myself telling my boss "Sorry, this meeting doesn't have a clear goal, so I'm dropping off." Anyone actually have the guts to do this when you're not the senior person in the room?
Once I have enough political capital within a company I'll just stop showing up to the ones that are a waste of time for me. If someone asks I'll let them know that it's not useful for me.
I think this misses the mark for why people join. We're talking about a professional setting here, I'm coming to your meeting because you invited me to join, not because of fear of missing out (on what?). All the points given in the article are good, but it misses the most important one: if you're hosting a meeting, only invite people who MUST [0] be there. If the meeting could still take place and be useful without someone, don't invite them just to listen in. If you want, shoot an email to a mailing list or post in Slack about it, but don't invite people just because.
> if you're hosting a meeting, only invite people who MUST [0] be there.
No! Do the opposite of this.
I enjoy the meetings where I can listen in and learn something from others. There can be a lot of value in these meetings — and if truly not, it is easy to slink away.
It is the meetings where the organizer thinks I "must" be there that are always a waste of time. Never fails. Keep me off these invite lists. They are useless.
First, a meeting is primarily not a way to spread knowledge. Knowledge should be spread in a format that is more resilient to time than our memories (which are surprisingly untrustworthy over even tiny time scales). For example; written text. The greatest benefit of text is that it can be asynchronously consumed, multiple times. Meetings are primarily for two things:
I think this makes sense in the abstract but not always in practice. I have been in many long back-and-forth Slack conversations explaining some piece of knowledge that would be better as a 20 minute meeting.
And so I think a better "mental model" of meetings might be functionally the same as human communication in general: for smaller and faster-acting groups, live communication (meetings) is often more efficient than writing. Especially when the team is small and needs to act quickly, because then the time cost of 5-20% of your manpower spending an hour to write out something that takes 10 minutes to explain via a video meeting walkthrough is not optimal.
But the more people your group has, the more you'll need to shift to a text-based communication method.
(This is also why I think remote work makes sense in many contexts, but does somewhat become less efficient in smaller, fast-moving companies. Unless you replace the in-person ad hoc meeting with a rapid on-demand meeting culture, you'll have some inefficiencies and move slower.)
I have seen some attempts to use AI transcription bots as an attempt to square the circle here and commit ephemeral meeting information into durable text information, and in general they aren't too bad actually.
Having an agenda and a moderator is not enough. What meetings also need is:
1. Context: Why are we here? What's the problem we're solving?
2. Actions: What decisions did we make? What are the next steps?
3. Follow-up: Who's doing what and by when?
Put this in a shared doc, a wiki, anywhere people can find it. If you can't see it, you can track it and you can't measure the outcome.
Just like developers measure the outcome of their planning and project meetings every sprint, managers and execs should do the same.
In theory, two things will happen once outcomes are tracked: Some managers will realise their meetings produce nothing useful, so they'll send fewer invites. And the company will shift focus from output to outcomes, which means fewer meetings and more real work getting done.
In practice, it depends on who you hire. People with less knowledge, experience, or agency tend to rely on meetings more than others.
The reality of meetings in most places I've seen is that key stakeholders have already formed an opinion beforehand, the meeting is a place to disseminate decisions that have already been made and align the organization.
Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time.
Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating as a team, which occasionally needs reinforcement.
It's an RAF forums in-joke that being invited to a "meeting without biscuits" means you are going to be reprimanded.
I like that (biscuits not the idea of being reprimanded), A former co-worker used to respond in a friendly (but he meant it!) way "no agenda; no attenda"
These days it is trivial to record the meeting and have it transcribed and then summarized by an LLM to produce "automatic" minutes. Searchability is a bonus.
I find that a good way to get out of some meetings is to ask for an agenda up front (since one is hardly ever provided). I can usually reply to the agenda items with 90% of the info they are looking for, and then that spawns a short back and forth to hammer out the other 10% over email. It works more often than not, but not as much as I'd like.
Tea party brings up images of little girls and stuffed animals around a table to my American mind, but I get what you mean.
My team has a weekly meeting with no management allowed and no agenda. I bring up anything important right at the start, then we go around and give everyone a chance to say what they're working on. No assignments are given out, but people who need help with something can ask and usually get it.
The main purpose of the meeting is to just keep everyone updated on what the rest of the team is doing and give us some water-cooler time. It makes up, in a small way, for the lack of personal interaction we have since going remote. I keep management out because I want us to be free to speak our minds.
The rest of our meetings are more formal and focused and get more actual work done, but without the "tea party" (I'm starting to like that term) we start losing cohesion as a team.
"Meetings are primarily for two things:" ... "Brainstorming" ..., ... "Making a decision as a group" ... "Secondary" ... "to expand and clarify knowledge"
I've said this before,
The "engineer's" pov on meetings is that they are an incredibly poor and overused instrument of getting things done and that it is beyond comprehension why "the company" continues to tolerate such expensive nonsense.
The manager's (current and aspiring) pov on meetings, especially physical presence meetings, is that they are the most effective way to reinforce the hierarchy/pecking order, sense allegiances and potential defectors, scout opportunities for ascension, or destabilize a rival in public.
You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?
As for the author's specific points:
Brainstorming in a meeting is by far the least effective way. It just comes down to the most brazen flaunting their unnuanced opinions in rapid fire while more considerate and intricate reasoning is speed ran and drowned out by loud advocacy.
"Group decisions", yes, to a point. Mostly needing 'formal' buy-in to CYA on a decision already made. "If you already knew this would be the (bad) outcome, why did you not speak up at the all hands meeting? Obviously you and everyone else supported this at the time".
"to expand and clarify knowledge": That is most often a lecture/presentation with Q&A attached, not a meeting
Btw, question to the wisdom of HN: Good meetings need minutes.
Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced?
Preferrably somewhat independently of the conference tool in use, because that varies a lot around here.
They're coming online with all this AI stuff. Zoom has an integrated one that I've used a few times, and even explicitly directed the AI to add things to the work items which has worked so far, though I haven't tried it very often to know how reliable that is.
But it's still early days... Zoom's is still really just "let's throw a transcription of the meeting at an LLM with a system prompt and let the chips fall where they may" rather than any sort of major integration yet that would let you do anything like get a live link to your bug tracker to propose a bug based on the conversation pre-filled with the LLM's best guess of the summary of your conversation or anything.
Google Workspace tools, like Google Meet, can automatically transcribe the meeting, and then you can use AI (Gemini) to summarize and generate searchable minutes.
Rant: I hate brainstorming meetings. A manager who wants to feel like they are doing something invite a mix of one or two experts, a clueless pm, engineers from an unrelated project, and handful of random ones hers. Next, with zero preparation we’re supposed to come up with groundbreaking new ideas. Then there is some voting and finally waiting for a summary or gameplay that’s postponed until the heat death of the universe. Perhaps I will bring cookies next time.
Sounds like a very poorly run brainstorming session.
How to do it right (IMHO): Have several short but rambling hallway conversations about the upcoming topic for 3-4 days before. Take long showers and let your mind wander. Then do the brainstorming session.
1:1s. Not really skippable, necessary part of work..
Update meetings: team update, all hands, demos, etc. Record and share out a link . Let people watch in their own time. Optionally do the meeting live (in person, online, etc.) for whoever wants to be physically/digitally present and "watch at 1x speed"
Decision meetings. Adhoc only and only when more efficient than taking a decision async (Slack, shared document, etc.) - shouldn't be skipped as these can be crucial for maintaining alignment
Planning meetings. Backlog grooming, retro, standup. Pare these back to their component pieces. Make more of the component pieces async over time. Can you groom the backlog purely async? Can standup be a Slack bot? Can retro be part of 1:1s, or another Slack bot? Other teams have found ways!
And then call out meetings' categories so your team can cull certain types of meetings.
People seemed to be brainwashed into thinking that meetings are ... actually necessary. If people can build the Linux kernel without meetings, solely over email, then your $1.99 app, or your project requiring coordinating more than two people can be done the same way. Write it down, debate and argue in text so anyone interested can see what's going on. There's your minutes, your agenda, your invite for future ones right there. Now go back to work (or continue, since you didn't have to leave it in the first place) and stop bothering people.
I would praise any leader that has the courage to call the meeting spade a spade knowing they're just corporate-sanctioned babysitting exercises, myth to be discarded.
The Linux kernel isn't a business. There's no 2025 revenue numbers they're hoping to hit with some cool new initiative, no high-paying customer threatening to run away to Windows if they don't get suchandsuch new kernel feature by end of quarter. It's a very different problem space, and these kind of business alignment problems are exactly the ones that are harder to resolve through email.
I walked into nearly every meeting I ever attended with a list and my working journal. If I have something important to share I bring a few copies of my highlights or just list things about other activities that I care about.
I’m an introspective introvert who found this the one time to hear everyone else’s pulse.
As for the meeting, each culture will evolve into what works for those involved. Leadership and horizontal stake factors shape how people share their views and listen.
In my experience, a lot of people call a meeting to try and make something happen. The thing _should_ be happening already but the team is not working efficiency in a well-thought-out manner. Rather than figure out what the real problem is with the working practices, or recognising some genuinely novel feature of the situation that is blocking progress, they resort just booking meeting after meeting until somehow it is resolved. I don't attend meetings without an agenda and at least a (sometimes optimistic) list of what the outputs of the meeting should be. Decision on X. Routes of investigation for Y. Outline plan on Z.
I have two separate points to add to this.
Point 1.
During the pandemic, I learned that meetings also support team cohesion. We experimented with less meetings, but quickly got to a point where we restored at least _some_ meetings to ensure we'd stay functional as a team. This still matters given that we're still working from home 60-80% of the time.
Point 2.
The meeting host needs to be able to answer the following questions for every invitee, and in turn, every invitee needs to know the answer to the following questions:
1) What is it that this person can _contribute to_ the meeting?
2) What is it that this person can _learn from_ the meeting?
With these two questions in mind, everything else becomes less important. For example, if everyone is clear about these two things, the meeting doesn't even need a description (or the other way around: if the answers to these questions are unclear, the meeting description can help answer them)
I’ve spent probably 60-70% of my day in meetings for the past 5 years. Article makes some good points. An agenda in the invite, moderator+the authority to tell _anyone_ on the call to stfu, minutes, and ending on time.
Some things I’d add:
1. Written next steps/follow-ups for what happens after the meeting
2. Due dates for next steps and the consequences for missing due dates
3. A log of decisions made and by whom
4. And just a general observation that if there are more than 10 people in the meeting it should be more like a webinar (one way information flow) vs a discussion with decisions/solutions expected.
Edit: 99.9% of my meetings are teams calls. Maybe 20 in person meetings in the past 5 years so consider that when reading my suggestions above.
I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite.
I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings.
Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership.
I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership, and most top leaders make themselves exceptions to every rule and that lack of meeting discipline trickles down and so meetings break down overall.
60 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] thread"Meeting cost calculator" where the cost of the meeting would tick up in real time on the wall.
IIRC the idea was to have everyone tap their keyfob on a reader and it'd get everyone's hourly salary from a database and start counting the price by the minute.
[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119
No! Do the opposite of this.
I enjoy the meetings where I can listen in and learn something from others. There can be a lot of value in these meetings — and if truly not, it is easy to slink away.
It is the meetings where the organizer thinks I "must" be there that are always a waste of time. Never fails. Keep me off these invite lists. They are useless.
I’ve been lightly enforcing a rule of my own too: “no agenda, no attenda”
I think this makes sense in the abstract but not always in practice. I have been in many long back-and-forth Slack conversations explaining some piece of knowledge that would be better as a 20 minute meeting.
And so I think a better "mental model" of meetings might be functionally the same as human communication in general: for smaller and faster-acting groups, live communication (meetings) is often more efficient than writing. Especially when the team is small and needs to act quickly, because then the time cost of 5-20% of your manpower spending an hour to write out something that takes 10 minutes to explain via a video meeting walkthrough is not optimal.
But the more people your group has, the more you'll need to shift to a text-based communication method.
(This is also why I think remote work makes sense in many contexts, but does somewhat become less efficient in smaller, fast-moving companies. Unless you replace the in-person ad hoc meeting with a rapid on-demand meeting culture, you'll have some inefficiencies and move slower.)
I have seen some attempts to use AI transcription bots as an attempt to square the circle here and commit ephemeral meeting information into durable text information, and in general they aren't too bad actually.
1) send knowledge to people who need to know it, tell them there's gonna be a Q&A meeting about it in X days.
2) have said meeting.
1. Context: Why are we here? What's the problem we're solving?
2. Actions: What decisions did we make? What are the next steps?
3. Follow-up: Who's doing what and by when?
Put this in a shared doc, a wiki, anywhere people can find it. If you can't see it, you can track it and you can't measure the outcome.
Just like developers measure the outcome of their planning and project meetings every sprint, managers and execs should do the same.
In theory, two things will happen once outcomes are tracked: Some managers will realise their meetings produce nothing useful, so they'll send fewer invites. And the company will shift focus from output to outcomes, which means fewer meetings and more real work getting done.
In practice, it depends on who you hire. People with less knowledge, experience, or agency tend to rely on meetings more than others.
Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating as a team, which occasionally needs reinforcement.
It's an RAF forums in-joke that being invited to a "meeting without biscuits" means you are going to be reprimanded.
Edit: good comment in this thread on the role of middle management meetings being intrinsically social/political: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708660
I like that (biscuits not the idea of being reprimanded), A former co-worker used to respond in a friendly (but he meant it!) way "no agenda; no attenda"
My team has a weekly meeting with no management allowed and no agenda. I bring up anything important right at the start, then we go around and give everyone a chance to say what they're working on. No assignments are given out, but people who need help with something can ask and usually get it.
The main purpose of the meeting is to just keep everyone updated on what the rest of the team is doing and give us some water-cooler time. It makes up, in a small way, for the lack of personal interaction we have since going remote. I keep management out because I want us to be free to speak our minds.
The rest of our meetings are more formal and focused and get more actual work done, but without the "tea party" (I'm starting to like that term) we start losing cohesion as a team.
I've said this before,
The "engineer's" pov on meetings is that they are an incredibly poor and overused instrument of getting things done and that it is beyond comprehension why "the company" continues to tolerate such expensive nonsense.
The manager's (current and aspiring) pov on meetings, especially physical presence meetings, is that they are the most effective way to reinforce the hierarchy/pecking order, sense allegiances and potential defectors, scout opportunities for ascension, or destabilize a rival in public.
You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?
As for the author's specific points:
Brainstorming in a meeting is by far the least effective way. It just comes down to the most brazen flaunting their unnuanced opinions in rapid fire while more considerate and intricate reasoning is speed ran and drowned out by loud advocacy.
"Group decisions", yes, to a point. Mostly needing 'formal' buy-in to CYA on a decision already made. "If you already knew this would be the (bad) outcome, why did you not speak up at the all hands meeting? Obviously you and everyone else supported this at the time".
"to expand and clarify knowledge": That is most often a lecture/presentation with Q&A attached, not a meeting
It's not only cynical, it's downright sociopathic if that's the sum of your opinion. Yes, even if you lay down the facts.
That's a signal for me. A signal, that the author of this shit of an article didn't bother reading his own article before publishing it.
This article brings nothing new useful to the table. That's a rehash of someone else's rehash of something they've read somewhere.
Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced?
Preferrably somewhat independently of the conference tool in use, because that varies a lot around here.
But it's still early days... Zoom's is still really just "let's throw a transcription of the meeting at an LLM with a system prompt and let the chips fall where they may" rather than any sort of major integration yet that would let you do anything like get a live link to your bug tracker to propose a bug based on the conversation pre-filled with the LLM's best guess of the summary of your conversation or anything.
Brainstorming meetings over Zoom, on the other hand...
How to do it right (IMHO): Have several short but rambling hallway conversations about the upcoming topic for 3-4 days before. Take long showers and let your mind wander. Then do the brainstorming session.
1:1s. Not really skippable, necessary part of work..
Update meetings: team update, all hands, demos, etc. Record and share out a link . Let people watch in their own time. Optionally do the meeting live (in person, online, etc.) for whoever wants to be physically/digitally present and "watch at 1x speed"
Decision meetings. Adhoc only and only when more efficient than taking a decision async (Slack, shared document, etc.) - shouldn't be skipped as these can be crucial for maintaining alignment
Planning meetings. Backlog grooming, retro, standup. Pare these back to their component pieces. Make more of the component pieces async over time. Can you groom the backlog purely async? Can standup be a Slack bot? Can retro be part of 1:1s, or another Slack bot? Other teams have found ways!
And then call out meetings' categories so your team can cull certain types of meetings.
I would praise any leader that has the courage to call the meeting spade a spade knowing they're just corporate-sanctioned babysitting exercises, myth to be discarded.
I’m an introspective introvert who found this the one time to hear everyone else’s pulse.
As for the meeting, each culture will evolve into what works for those involved. Leadership and horizontal stake factors shape how people share their views and listen.
Are people calling meetings to yap, or with clear and concise goals?
Yappers do not understand the difference because their meetings are not bereft of articulable utility.
Point 2. The meeting host needs to be able to answer the following questions for every invitee, and in turn, every invitee needs to know the answer to the following questions: 1) What is it that this person can _contribute to_ the meeting? 2) What is it that this person can _learn from_ the meeting?
With these two questions in mind, everything else becomes less important. For example, if everyone is clear about these two things, the meeting doesn't even need a description (or the other way around: if the answers to these questions are unclear, the meeting description can help answer them)
Some things I’d add: 1. Written next steps/follow-ups for what happens after the meeting 2. Due dates for next steps and the consequences for missing due dates 3. A log of decisions made and by whom 4. And just a general observation that if there are more than 10 people in the meeting it should be more like a webinar (one way information flow) vs a discussion with decisions/solutions expected.
Edit: 99.9% of my meetings are teams calls. Maybe 20 in person meetings in the past 5 years so consider that when reading my suggestions above.
I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite.
I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings.
Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership.
I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership, and most top leaders make themselves exceptions to every rule and that lack of meeting discipline trickles down and so meetings break down overall.