Actually, we have regular 3pm Friday meetings (fully remote team). Attendance optional, but we basically shoot the breeze and do some light drinking as we wind the week down. Sometimes we go over issues that have been dogging us all week but we generally punt things that are getting too dense for our increasingly foggy brains into next week.
3 Likes
Yeah, I’d heard about that study of hangry judges being less likely to grant parole before. I’d definitely want to avoid appearing in front of a hungry judge. But as for productivite meetings generally, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish I can see how being in a post-meal stupor could have downsides too.
Then again I used to work for an engineering company run by Germans who had no compunctions about getting big pitchers of beer at lunch, and they always said the most creative design solutions came after such lunches.
4 Likes
please tell me they weren’t designing planes or bridges… 
2 Likes
Came to say the same. I had a meeting this morning at 5am my time with people in Mountain, Eastern, Central European, and Singaporean time, and I have one tonight at 6pm with other people from the same time zones minus Europe.
2 Likes
Can confirm, 11 is a great time! Monday? Even better! Friday… die.
1 Like
IME, far more important than the timing, productivity seems to hinge upon having a clear goal of the meeting with clear outcomes, as in, “by the end, we will decide next steps for this particular thing,” and organized facilitators who restate those next steps and identify who’s responsible for what.
Or there are the meetings whose purpose is to keep lines of communication open so people aren’t inadvertently duplicating efforts or anything, and those work great as casual lunch or “after the pitcher of beer at lunch” meetings 
just shouldn’t be more frequent than monthly, IME.
3 Likes
I once took a course by Edward Tufte on presenting data efficiently. He had a whole section on making meetings more efficient and how powerpoint presentations waste huge amounts of time (true!). Unfortunately his solution was sending people stuff well in advance so they can be prepared for a meeting (best practice!), but he seemed to think that meant you could actually expect them to show up having read and tried to understand it, which IME just isn’t how it works for most organizer/attendee combinations.
3 Likes
In addition to that flaw, if you can send the information enough in advance and people get prepared, doesn’t this really become “This meeting could’ve been an e-mail”?
6 Likes
I’d say fundamentally yes, but too often, practically speaking, no, for the same reason. The people who need the info won’t always read it, and if they do they will often misunderstand it even if they think they understood it, and you may not have the ability to hold them responsible afterwards in a way that matters.
10 people may need the same info presented 4 different ways for everyone to really get it, and only 2 of them may realize there’s a communication problem at all, and having all of them together in a meeting, with each of them bored by the redundancy 75% of the time, may be the only way the whole group gets what it needs.
I agree there are still a lot of meetings that should be just emails, or shared databases/spreadsheets/slide decks/recordings. Most company-wide meetings that are just managers making presentations are like that. No need for synchronicity, no need for everyone to listen at a fixed pace. Maybe I’m just lucky that that’s a small fraction of my meetings.
2 Likes
That’s too many meetings! How are people supposed to get anything done if over half of their day is meetings?
I worked for a company like that. They went from having project meetings to having meetings to prep for the project meetings to meetings to prep, the project meeting, and the post-project meeting meeting, and eventually started having meetings about why projects were taking so long to complete! When someone suggested the problem was too many meetings, they were blown off, of course.
3 Likes
Depends on the job, I think. Someone in sales very often needs that many meetings a day or more. I have regular meetings with my boss, each of my direct reports, and clients I’m doing projects for, 0.5-1 hrs each, and most of them are actually really valuable, because they’re how we iterate quickly and get more detailed bi-directional feedback than can happen in an email chain. They average 2-3 hrs/day for me.
Note: I’ve only ever worked for companies 30-300 people in size, and I realize that often greatly affects meeting culture.
2 Likes
Fair. I don’t even think of client meetings as “meetings” in the traditional sense. I classify those as either sales calls or project updates.
3 Likes
Ugh, me too. I was burning out and was able to drastically cut down on the number of meetings I personally had to attend, but I still ended up leaving.
One trick I learned to deal with the stuff @AnthonyC mentions above is, I’d send the stuff for review, have a meeting to talk through the comments and come to consensus (which, typically more than half hadn’t even read it yet, and this would be important policy stuff), give them another cycle to review. And then, 2 weeks before my actual intended release date I’d send around the “final” version so they had an advanced copy, and suddenly everyone would have time to review and make comments they should’ve made months ago, and I’d incorporate and get out on the real deadline. But it sucks to have to be so tricky with grown-ass adults.
6 Likes
I rarely meet with the same people twice in a day. I’m moving various projects forward, meeting with contractors, reporting up, and receiving reports on status from projects I’m not involved in. Less frequently, offering career mentoring, hearing feedback, and other employee improvement efforts, etc. But your followup to @AnthonyC hits the nail on the head. What is a “meeting” anyway? Here, we broadly define it as any time two or more people get together and are not actively working on the implementation phase of a project. (Debugging with a partner? Not a meeting. Planning order quantities together? Meeting.)
Yes, it does leave less time than I would like most weeks for me to work “on the business” rather than “in the business.” But from what I’ve seen and in my opinion, I think I run tight, productive meetings and I’m pretty satisfied that they move things forward faster than not having them. Otherwise they’re quickly descheduled.
2 Likes
I took this course a couple of years ago and I think he’s modified his recommendation. Now he says, set aside 20 minutes at the beginning of the meeting for people to read or review the relevant material, and come to the meeting with printouts.
Still not convinced.
4 Likes
I’m sorta lucky that we have a document control system where I can set reviewers and a deadline, and the system bugs the shit out of people until they check the document out and review it. Sure, they can easily bypass that step but it also means that, if they have changes later, I can really hold their feet to the fire; or just plain reject the changes.
This, of course, is key. Publish an agenda, solicit new topics ahead of the meeting, have a to-do list, and a “place” to park off-topic discussions, and most of the time the meeting hits it’s goals ahead of schedule.
2 Likes
Ha, ever since Microsoft Teams came out and is integrated into everything else… it broadcasts when someone joins the meeting (often up to 15 minutes early because people with tons of meetings just click on whatever popup the computer gives them as a reminder) and everyone else feels pressured to join.
Half my meetings start like 5 minutes early with more than half the crew there, but the actual people with context who needed the meeting are rolling in from other meetings – usually on time of the actual meeting’s scheduled start – and barge in like Leroy Jenkins to disrupt the whole thing.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
