How to Attend Meetings
docs.google.com335 points by spagoop a day ago
335 points by spagoop a day ago
I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
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For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of which are followed nor what anyone else wants.
Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
> I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly.
My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
> I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message. Do you sound like a dick? Yes. Does it work? Also yes, unless you weren't actually required in that meeting, in which case it becomes a self-solving problem.
And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
Sometimes it's not just about whether others think you should be there.
I echo the parents sentiment - I don’t need to be there for a one hour meeting while 12 people give a perspective on a topic, but if you make the wrong decision I will say no.
My job as a higher level manager is to ensure that whoever is there on our behalf avoids stupid decisions being made, and if I can’t delegate that then I need to go myself. Sometimes its unavoidable, and sometimes politics prevail but 95% of the time making my priorities clear to my team and being consistent in my them has the correct outcome.
This can lead to weird dynamics. A lot of workplaces, no one seems to have direct power (or incentive!) to say "yes" to anything but lots of people (including 3 teams you weren't even aware existed) are able to "provide feedback" or say no.
This leads to all progress being achieved very slowly if at all, or by using the element of surprise and then seeking forgiveness.
> if you make the wrong decision I will say no
While I know your heart is in the right place, as someone with a reporting structure on both sides, I can tell you that this kind of handholding is the entire reason they keep making bad decisions. You must let people fail, and from there your entire job is ensuring that winding back that decision is the responsibility of the people who made it. Few decisions are irreversible, and everything will almost always work out in the end despite how it feels at the time -- but letting people fail, then making them clean up after themselves, is possibly the absolute best teaching method out there.
I think you’re reading into a hip fire comment here - I’m not saying I’ll override any decision you make that i disagree with. Simply that if push comes to shove my team should feel empowered to make a decision and bring it to me for “ass covering” knowing that I will challenge them on it if I disagree, but also feeling confident that they know how I’ll feel about it before they make that call. I trust them to do this without me there.
Blindly allowing someone to make a bad call without questioning it is as bad as overruling their call without any explanation!
If you have a team member you don’t trust to make good calls, then you need to coach them.
> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
If you are the one responsible for the work to fix something, you need to be the one driving the meetings or pushing alternative communication.
This is why all of the generic “just say no to meetings” advice is useless: It’s all dependent on the context. You can’t just decline meetings from your boss’s boss without good reason, for example.
A lot of snarky internet advice about saying “no” at the office is just people venting or doing imaginary role play. In a real office you have to push for communication, pull details out of people, identify who you need to report to and who you can safely decline.
If you get in a situation where you’re declining meetings and the responsibility for content of that meeting lands in your lap, you have made a severe misjudgment. These things are easy to clarify with a little proactive communication, but you get nowhere if you just say “no” or send off a singular “agenda plz” email and then forget about it. People are busy. You have to push and make it clear what you need from them, following up if it doesn’t come.
I’d amend that to “A lot of … advice … is just people … doing imaginary role play.”
A lot of bad advice out there, being delivered with confidence.
Bad advice, bad information, absolutely.
I’m not sure if this is more bad advice, but it seems like we’d all be better off if people just shared their experiences, rather than trying to proscribe them for others: you telling me to decline meetings is worthless, but you describing how you did, and what the effects were has value.
> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
Unless your head is on the line, why do you care?
Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
> Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
From my experience it is going to happen regardless of whether you pay attention or not. People will fuck up, period. Compulsively being hypervigilant will drive you insane.
Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility, it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some point you'll need to compromise.
Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very good points, you'll probably bear with it.
As a manager or even a technical leader, your head IS on the line, it just might not seem so obvious.
Rollout delays, customer debacles, etc all shape your image to promo panels.
If you’re just a junior engineer, it’s not like it will be held against you, but you certainly missed an opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren’t NPCs.
> but you certainly missed an opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren’t NPCs
Depends on a company where you work. At our org you’ll get nothing out of it but headache, salary doesn’t change either way.
Because caring about your work, the people around you, and the quite frankly stuff in general is healthy and gives life meaning.
If you go somewhere 8 hours a day, you'd like that place to matter to you. Anything else is just depressing.
You are correct that caring is important - but it also isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing it wrong.
Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either extreme and, especially folks that are naturally empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally for it.
> Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message.
If you have a good manager you can often CC them or quote them in your response as well "Sorry, I'm busy with project work and Sarah wants me to stay focused to hit our deadlines. If we're going to need to budget time outside of it I'll need a clear agenda to offer as a rationale to my stakeholders."
I think it really helps to sell this if you've got casual impromptu voice calls as a norm in the company. If it was really just a quick thing then throw up a hangout for us to chat - if it's worth scheduling a meeting for it's certainly worth actually putting together an agenda.
As an aside - my company recentlyish switched from google to ms for calendar management and (among many things MS is terrible at) the fact that agendas aren't immediately visible in meetings on your calendar is the absolute worst UX decision.
> My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
But the thing is, in big companies, you can keep climbing all your life and never reach that level. You can be a VP and it still doesn't matter, because you're one of several hundred VPs in a company that values lawsuit-proof consistency over giving executives infinite latitude. You're still dealing with the same spreadsheets, processes, and meetings as everyone else. At best, you might be able to send your minions to some, but that doesn't solve the issue, it just messes up someone else's day.
In a company of several hundred people, on the other hand, you don't really need to climb far because relatively little is set in stone. So to folks who are at Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, and who're waiting for the day when they're finally free to say "no" to overhead, I have bad news.
I’m a Senior Director. I can and do say no. But, let me tell you, it doesn’t go over well—especially for declining meetings.
Sure; they can go to my boss and he’ll largely cover, but it’s still not enough. I imagine unless you’re the CEO/equiv, this isn’t a thing you can do without fallout.
> My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
Well that's exactly the point- in most orgs, only high level people are granted the discretion to manage their time this way.
Fun story-
Worked at Sonos for several years. Was an IC4. My boss empowered me to say no to meetings whenever I wanted, and she was a new manager!
Sometimes all it takes is someone with a tiny bit of courage.
Literally nobody but people who want to waste their time and not do work or PMs who don’t know how to communicate want to have all these meetings.
I zealously avoid meetings and now that I’m a team lead at my new job, I’ll be encouraging my team to do the same and covering their asses when needed.
I assume this works nice to get you out of any meeting they didn't want you to attend, but couldn't just remove you from.
If they plan to move resources out of your team but need highers approval, having a meeting that you refused to attend sounds like a good first step. You might be there on the next one, but the terrain is already prepared. And as it's a sensitive subject, a vague agenda would also be natural enough.
Often, corporate culture is more about maintaining status-quo vs. actually achieving or organizing efforts. People often just want to hear themselves talk, stroke their ego, and position/politic. As an IC/leader/owner this can be _so_ annoying.
Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent team.
Yeah, in my experience "attending" a meeting is almost never a choice. I think a better slide title would have been "Scheduling a meeting is a choice". I see so many meetings are created (with a default time slot of 30 minutes), for what could have been a 5 or 10 minute phone call or even just a quick email.
> Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice;
I am pretty aggressive about declining meetings and protecting my time. And I still agree to what you say. No matter how you structure meetings, there’s always a chance that items unrelated to the agenda are discussed, decisions are made when they’re not supposed to be made, incorrect information is conveyed or misunderstandings are not addressed. Unfortunate reality of corporate world is that you’re more likely to ask yourself be included than you decline meetings.
This of course doesn’t even touch the performative parts of corporate bs where “yOu NEeD tO Be MOrE ViSIblE”
Let me tell you what visibility looks like:
- regular reports sent to all stakeholders with relevant detail - videos that demonstrate important features that folks can watch on their own time - scheduling small, focused meetings with the most important stakeholders so they can actually get what they need
It doesn’t look like going to meetings and never talking, or worse, going to meetings and blathering on so someone knows you were there.
Depends on who is evaluating that. Not disagreeing what you mentioned helps, just that it doesn’t work everywhere.
Yea like having 20 people on a project update call may be a poor of their time, but for boss man it's a great use - everyone he needs in the same room! Don't need to chase anyone down and someone can chime in if something inaccurate is said
Way too much upside for this kind of "low value" meeting to disappear
Google Calendar/Workspace does have a cool option to create a Google Doc for notes, that is automatically shared with everybody on the invite.
It’s a great spot to place an agenda, meeting notes, action items, etc.
> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
One approach that I've seen work is start the meeting by having everybody read a document (see https://www.sixpagermemo.com). It's fresh on everybody's mind, and everybody just read the same content.
>doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary
Description is sent along with the initial invite, and for subsequent invites, there's a text box for commentary on the sent emails.
Or what are you looking for?
We do so much on slack I can safely ignore email at work and just look at meeting notes on Google calendar. I would expect that to include these notes but I’m not sure. Also I agree people won’t read them anyway.
(not the GP) I want a good agenda, which means with markup possible, including links.
> "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
It is completely valid to say "no" to meeting in our company. Not to all of them, but to most. Or to ask "Do I have to be here? Why was I invited, it seems out of my scope" and move from there. I see people doing that and I was doing that.
> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
Because meetings have become part of the job for many office workers, I'd say the majority of them, they (the meetings) are not sees as a means to an end anymore (as in "we hold this meeting in order to solve a specific problem"), and I'm not even sure that that hasn't always been the case, meetings are seen as a mainstay of holding an office-job, as means in themselves: "We go to (office) work so it's only natural that we'll hold meetings".
That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback should be given 1-1), but rest assured plenty of folks understand and will not hold it against you if you vote with your attendance.
I've had one manager over 10 jobs spanning 40 years that was on board with this
I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees. There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.
Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.
Intel in the 90s-2000s did. I did customer research on them (worked on powerpoint at the time). I was amazed that the CEO gave a mandate to the company that if an agenda was not posted to a meeting 24H before the meeting, you did not have to attend that meeting. They also had other crazy strict meeting rules that I forgot.
> There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.
Exactly. Love the deck. Like you, agree with many things.
My similar suggestions (but a little looser):
1. Long meetings need agendas. But don't expect perfection. You can get away with no agenda in a short (30 or less) meeting.
2. Very large meetings need a DRIVER (person). I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no. I don't want free-form conversation in a large meeting. I want someone to drive the hell out of the meeting. Keep people in check!
Most important:
3. Do what you can to discover the underlying motivation of the meeting organizer and solve their motivation some other way. Recently sat through a disastrous JIRA-focused meeting. Talking about tickets, their purpose, their descriptions, etc. But I knew the person needed the data for executive-team reporting. So I offered to help fill in gaps (without a call) to improve their reporting. I saved myself future time, he got better reporting - a win.
Constant and outright decline behavior will probably backfire.
Wow, I might need to steal that idea for bypassing Jira discussions. I hate Jira with all my might.
Please do. It works!
I don't think most folks are both interested and trying to sit in mindless meetings (like my JIRA example).
That JIRA example is particularly annoying. It's a product team (with an external consultant) using JIRA to track progress. But like anything with a reporting component, people are now optimizing toward what's reported - not toward real work. Success in a week (or sprint) is number of tickets closed not whether anything actually happened.
I declined several of these JIRA update meetings. At least two invites popped onto my calendar as agenda-less hour-long blocks.
Then I joined one, asked all the questions around purpose, and suggested what I would do to help with less overall effort and a reduction in pesky meeting invites.
> I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no.
This makes the meeting end really quick when nobody has anything to discuss right? For some people the only way you are ever going to get them to bring something up is by asking in a meeting.
the slowest talking person always brings up the dumbest thing that for some reason half the room suddenly cares deeply about
In a functional organization, it's almost certainly going to be absurd to argue that you can't provide value to any of the meetings that you are invited to.
I can provide value to any meeting that I’m invited to. That doesn’t mean it’s the most valuable thing I can do with my time (especially given how tragically frustrating most of them are).
I mean, I can probably rephrase things to somehow eventually pin you down to admitting that maybe some meetings are worthwhile or otherwise necessary.
I’m looking for where GP or even the original presentation said that no meetings were worthwhile or otherwise necessary.
Can you help me find it?
The context I'm pulling in is by the caps in the comment I initially replied to, would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING. Note the caps.
As far as the GP, what I'm getting at is that they are tediously nitpicking my phrasing rather than addressing my point. If there are some meetings that make sense to spend your time on, (in the context of my comment) what the fuck does it matter if there are also some that it doesn't.
If they think they have never spent their time well on a meeting, an explication of that would be more interesting than saying that they can find better things to do than attend some meetings.
The nuance is that most meetings aren’t worth my time, even if I can add value to being in all of them.
> wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines
Well yes, if the culture doesn't allow it then it's not going to happen. That doesn't mean those cultures don't exist or that they can't be created, even if just in a pocket
I just work here.
Then you can just keep going to meetings and hating it! Culture is created from both ends.
The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary.
"Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!"
"Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic."
Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executive summary of a book instead of reading the book. You're letting the clock dictate the importance of something to a company, and not the something. It's like delaying a huge feature launch because the person in charge of it is out sick.
The reading -is the thing-. Discussing the difficult decision is -the thing-.
I recognize that there is a fishbowl effect, where if you allocate four hours for a meeting about office dishwasher etiquette, you'll be amazed that all four hours are filled with lively, constant discussion. So there does need to be some light facilitation. But I'd argue that over-facilitating is just as unproductive as under-facilitating.
As for the other stuff, agendas are great. A purpose for a meeting is great. Having the right people in the meeting, great.
Relatedly, the craziest thing I keep hearing in corporate land is this idea of "open calendars." So your hard-won 15-minute lunch break can vanish because someone drops a meeting on it, and you first hear about it via email notif. Calendars should be opt-in, period.
As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”. The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics.
Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.
Basically my experience too. I've gradually come to the view that meetings are best as a place to communicate decisions/rubber stamp. If I need a particular outcome I will pre meet with the key people to get their input / socialise the decision / etc. And then the meeting just serves as formal approval.
> As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”.
Are you sure it's not that you're just bad at leading meetings?
I ask that tongue in cheek, but my thesis is the same. How are you measuring the positive criteria for a meeting? How would you know if some variable has a meaningful impact on said metrics? Are the metrics you're tracking the same metrics others are using, and if not how do you translate them?
Most meetings lack a clearly defined success criteria. Most attendees couldn't describe this criteria, even if pressed. Given my experience, that's the root problem.
People who are trying, often use "this meeting has an agenda" as criteria for if a meeting is likely to be useful. But this is a heuristic detached from what is actually important. Meetings are about, obtaining consensus, or uncovering some truth*. If your success criteria doesn't reflect either of these. It's much more accurately described as a waste of time, rather than a meeting.
Pretend meetings aren't a thing, you're requesting a significant amount of time from a number of people. Now, on top of that, add in the cost of context switching. You're proposing a completely novel approach to solving a specific problem. Define that problem.
Most of the meetings I've attended evaporate under that criteria.
Meetings without a doubt, solve real problems. But most meetings aren't solving any problems. They're checking boxes, because that's what people expect. Which results in the pattern you describe. it's either a waste of time, or a waste of time, in the other direction.
> The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics.
It still sounds like to me, you're gauging the quality of a meeting, based mostly on the time cost. That shouldn't be considered*. Instead, assume you have infinite time. In this magical world, every sits in this room until you've arrived at [objective]. Pretend that amount of time might as well be infinite. Is the objective worth infinite time? Or can you still not describe the objective outside of the time cost?
> Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.
There's a nugget of truth, or more accurately reality behind this observation. Meetings that are rated positively, correlate strongly with context alignment. What concrete meaning have you taken from this critical observation?
If you have already have clear alignment, what impact should that have on the next meeting?
Imagine "next meeting" sounded like an absolutely ridiculous question, why would you ever consider having a "next meeting"? What a stupid question for some rando on the Internet to ask?!
Once you shift your thinking into being able to answer, why on earth, there would be a follow up meeting... You'll understand how to extract value from meetings.
Also, do note... sometimes meetings are just to hang out and shoot the shit. This might be more important than [average meeting] so don't undervalue the real benefits of spending time with coworkers! I've lost count of the number of difficult problems I've solved by casually ranting to a friend who asks smart questions. (which I take to mean, don't step on important conversations, for the sake of some bullshit agenda... try asking people if they felt like the conversations in a meeting were friendly and welcoming, see what that question does for your success criteria long term)
Just 100% on target, bravo, no notes.
I ran a team for an entire year with basically only shooting the shit meetings and occasional consensus building meetings and it was the most productive and happy the team had ever been.
> if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”.
You shouldn't ever be solving things live in a meeting, unless it's a 5 second "flip the switch" fix.
99% of fixing from my experience comes from deep work by an IC or 1 on 1 pair collaboration calls by teammates who work great together.
Could this be handled with an agenda? I'm thinking being candid about the meeting length. "Although I feel like this may take 30 minutes, scheduling a 15 minute buffer for Q&A, we may end early"
I been a part of endless meeting with ”lively discussion” with the whole team. Results are always slim to none. Instead if you allocate 15 minutes for a topic and there is no conclusion, stop the discussion and say that it must continue on another allocated time. This way people come better prepared with an actual agenda to get things done.
I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer.
e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons.
In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them.
I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.
Not shilling, but Microsoft Teams with a Premium license does this, and it works very well. I am not sure how I feel about this, though - not everything needs to be 'on the record'. It's beneficial for most topics, but most != all.
In one conversation, their AI saw right through me tiptoeing around a delicate matter where a problem was caused by a client's inaction. The meeting summary laid it out correctly, but it wasn't great from a relationship perspective.
I have tried a few of the LLM solutions. So far for me https://fathom.video is head and shoulders above the rest, excellent speaker annotation and LLM summarization, full video recording and matching video position to transcript (i.e. click on section of transcript to go to that part of the video), reasonable pricing, decent free tier. I have no affiliation at all with Fathom, just enjoy their product!
This won't happen in tech companies because that would make legal discovery a lot easier.
I thought that, too, but I'm seeing lots of companies in tech implement this almost by default because it's built-in to tools that are adding a lot of tangible value.
People may hate Jira and Atlassian, but let me tell you that one of the most magical things ever is recording a meeting in Look, having the action items immediately turned into Jira tickets or Confluence tasks, and a summary of the meeting posted to a Confluence page, tagging the appropriate people and with a link to the full recording.
This is built into Atlassian’s Teamwork Collection.
Had an idea
These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules.
So...
What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.
People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.
> Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.
Like phishing training, but for meeting attendance. Fail the test and accept a decoy meeting and you must complete a round of mandatory training in how to distinguish a useless meeting from one that is worth attending.
I wonder if enterprises would buy this? Phishing training companies make a living.
I attempted a startup to fix meeting culture a few years back. Selling the product was nearly impossible. We got some nibbles and a couple bites, but it eventually became clear that the vast majority of companies just don't care about the problem. They'll tell you it's a problem (because it is) but nobody wants to write a check to fix it.
When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way to get quality heads down time.
All of them were titled something like “$X WG” where X was what we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for “Working Group”.
We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.
I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.
I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(
YMMV whether this will fly in your company culture, but I titled mine "Focus time, please ask before scheduling".
And when people inevitably didn't ask, I'd just decline unless I especially wanted to attend. I find myself getting invited to meetings sometimes just because the organizer wants to be inclusive and make sure everyone is looped in who might want to be, and I figure that's what's going on if they added me without asking.
If it's really important for me to be there, they'll see my time block and ask me.
> Your boss
That requires your boss to be good at meetings, and in particular to take extra care of preparing meetings with well crafted agendas and not just setting up random spots where they spend the first 5min remembering the actually ultra important thing they needed to discuss with you.
I've never seen an org where that applies to most higher ups. In particular for stuff they don't want to leave in writing or are delicate subjects.
I'm somewhat convinced this is already a thing. It would explain some of the meeting notices I get.
>What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.
What could this possibly accomplish? I accept meeting requests not because I have some perverse desire to waste my time (and everyone else's), but because when I fail to show up for meetings (as has happened, quite by accident), I get shit for it. The eastern European folks are constantly setting meetings before 8am, but they can't just set them and leave them there. They'd delete these, put them at another time, but forget to include my name in the list... and then my boss starts giving me hell for why I'm not showing up to them. Yeh, I love getting up at 5:30am just so I can psychically deduce that you're all in an early morning meet.
So now you'd want to spam up my inbox with 15% more meetings, but I have to guess which of these imbecilic invitations are the real ones, and to taunt me if I can't always tell? I'm not the problem here, punishing me can't improve this for anyone.
One of the costs of saying no to meetings is that going to other people's (useless) meetings is a super low effort way to say "I value our working relationship." Not going often explicitly sends the opposite message.
Sometimes there is a whole set of rituals used to "prove" you actually care about the group, and the rituals only ever happen in meetings, and you cannot change them without bothering a lot of people.
Also sometimes who gets to work on a future project is just based on perceived interest
And not going to a meeting may be perceived that you aren't interested in that project
Though these guides are well meaning, they completely misread the inadvertent outcome of meetings. Even a perfectly planned meeting has a number of other effects beside resolving the stated agenda.
When and how people are invited and declined, who attends, who engages, how people engage are all signals gleaned from a meeting.
Think of how many times someone felt jilted by not being invited, called on, not responded to -- etc -- during a meeting.
If you consider yourself hyper rational and business focused, you have to account for the personal dynamics occurring before, during & after a meeting.
You ever wonder why everyone "hates" meetings, yet they still invest in them? Even being cynical or dismissive is a form of attention.
Meetings are like money in that people are interested even though they say otherwise.
No, people are interested in the outcomes of meetings.
They aren’t interested the meetings themselves.
On the off chance they care deeply about hearing one person’s perspective - there are much better ways to get that.
To be blunt, this looks like a feel-good piece from someone who spent an ungodly amount of time in shitty meetings but have no agency on the situation, will vent with diagrams as they can't tackle the actual issues of the org not giving a shit about their time.
If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped.
Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are.
It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them.
Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job.
Or a mix of both.
Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.
Love these slides, hard agree on _all_ points. But, be absolutely certain on the culture before you start declining meetings, even if for valid reasons like outlined in this presentation. Declining meetings can be seen as a negative, "not a team player", thing... and, I really have to be certain on my leadership, the company, and the context before I push back on someone wanting my time. Even if their request for my time was arbitrary, or useless.
I think that’s why the document had some suggested pushback to meeting invites (e.g. “what’s the agenda so I can prepare”)
Yep! And, I send that exact message/email all the time in good faith. But, even with that - if someone just wants to talk, trying to nail them down on a topic can be _seen_ as obstructive, even though it's productive. Unfortunately, lots of people who schedule meetings just want to talk with not much outcome.
I'm being pedantic, but my experienced inverse of these slides is that meetings are the "social" part of work. It really really depends on the company, the leadership, the people. But, sometimes - it's more in your professional interest to talk about + market the work vs. actually doing it.
Ultimately, we agree :)
In my experience, sometimes the job is just to talk and socialize — eg, with sister teams or stakeholders.
For my own sanity, I at least try to accurately label those… which is how my calendar usually fills with “1:1”, “coffee”, “sync”, etc. Maybe it’s pedantic, but the accurate labels help my sanity by letting me know which meetings I can show up without prep, a coffee and cookie, and push if things get busy.
Link is dead. Did anyone make a copy that can reupload?
I would also like a copy, someone in this community must have made a copy. #Mirror for quick searcher's.
It really is a tragedy. I can't find it anywhere and I really wanted to reference it for future meetings.
@spagoop can you reupload it?
While I have several disagreements with this deck, there are two large ones:
1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to prepare for the weekly staff meeting, rather than many small meetings every day. It also avoids the problem of people feeling not included - you're always invited to the one huge meeting every week, it's up to you to attend or skip.
2. The problem with meeting culture cannot be solved with education on how to say no, it's about admitting that attending meetings actually does convey a lot of things. Lots of information is not shared outside of meetings. Seniority of attendees actually does have a huge impact on visibility in folks' careers. A lot of the advice in this slide deck feels like it should work, but doesn't in practice because of self interest.
The education that needs to happen is quite different imo:
- leadership needs to be done through writing
- meetings should be recorded and minutes sent out broadly, along with allowing silent attendance.
- decisions need to give time for dissent outside of meeting attendees before committing.
While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful. I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that:
1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several times.
2. Most useful subordinate information (the kind that doesn't get repeated) only needs to be related to 1 person 80%+ of the time. It's vanishingly rare 3 or more people need some information that isn't ever repeated elsewhere.
The only really useful work in meetings is making decisions. This is an essential feature, but a big problem is often many "spectators" are invited (attendees without decision power or context). Being a pure spectator in a meeting is almost always completely pointless. Also, people like to make decisions/input so meetings are rife with bike shedding (most people have decision power + context for low importance items usually).
Looks like it has been deleted. Does anyone have a copy?
I'm tickled by the idea of someone using that flowchart and determining -- can I contribute a unique perspective? Absolutely! Does my unique perspective have value? No way!
Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly.
This seems to be missed by the author.
Using meetings to sync on status is an anti-pattern. Questions can be asked in tickets and shared documents. True feelings are rarely shared in large forums anyway and are only reliably shared in private 1:1 sessions.
Everyone having a common understanding of the state of the world is important and not always efficient, or even possible, to do it async. Ideally, everyone would have good response times on messages and emails, always write clearly, but this is the real world, and you can't guarantee that. Often, tickets bounce back and forth between people for weeks when a quick meeting will answer things quickly. Sometimes this is best to happen in Status meetings IMO.
> Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly.
No, there are none. Whoever does those needs to check their fucking ego and just send an email/update md file like a normal human.
At a previous team, our ceo would send out a weekly 5 minute “catch up” video. This covered pretty much everything you needed to know in our company, it saved so many hours, until people complained it could be a message, and then people couldn’t find the message in the other updates and eventually it became a bimonthly hour long meeting for 60 people as they always do!
> sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly
Or just hire adults who know how to proactively communicate issues and concerns without a group babysitting session?
There's so much content and so many opinions on "meetings" that are polarized and come from a very narrow viewpoint. This particular POV seems reasonably critical of meetings but also recognizing that they are often warranted and can be carried out effectively.
I was happy to see "rallying the troops" as an acceptable reason to have a big meeting, because in my opinion it can be a good reason for a big meeting to exist (even though I'm sure many people disagree.)
I'd also add that if nothing was written down (and ideally sent to participants afterward), the meeting was a waste of time.
These are fantastic! I've done similar and seen some positive outcomes at work. As the one usually sending meetings - I have been leaning heavily on asynchronous first (teams chat) then if needed we hop into a focused meeting with a clear agenda. It's been liberating to see the reactions that other people like this too instead of another meeting. More often than not we never needed the meeting.
Did anyone make a copy? File is deleted.
Red flag: the meeting has more than 10 attendees (maybe even fewer).
Decline.
Meetings with more than 10 attendees usually means only one - maybe 2-3 - people are talking.
This can be recorded and shared out.
Don’t make me sit through a monologue at 1x, with most of the content not relevant to me.
We don’t need all-hands meetings. Have the execs get together if they must, record the presentation, and send out the recording.
Viewing should be optional, since likely only middle management cares about it anyway.
They can, then, disseminate the relevant info to their teams, if there’s anything that’s relevant (the relevant bits can likely be summed up in 60 seconds).
Meetings only make sense if all parties invited will be talking, or all the information shared is highly relevant to them.
Otherwise, there are better forms of communicating the information other than a synchronous meeting.
As somone who vigorously declines meetings, this gave me some extra criteria to use (estimated speaking time per attendee)
What I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every meeting that I schedule.
Could NYT also produce two more guides?
1. How To Use Teams/Slack/Etc.
2. How To Use Email
Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up.
Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make email intentional and high-value.
Point being: if any one of (1) email, or (2) chat, or (3) meetings is not working well, I bet you have problems in either or both of the others.
I have a feeling, though I lack proof, that opinions about meetings are strongly correlated with temperament. Specifically, extraversion as defined in the Big Five. I suspect that people low on extraversion are overrepresented on this site, and those people tend to hate meetings most.
To be clear, I think the reason why temperament is important is that if you put a gun to everybody's head, they actually agree on the ideal type of meeting, though they will quibble about the details. The amount of quibbling reveals that the real issue is more emotional than practical. Some people, by nature have a much higher tolerance for imperfect meetings, and even enjoy an unstructured conversation to recharge their social battery. Some people very much do not, and are correct that this is a waste of their time, and if they don't get anything out of it, they shouldn't have to take part.
I'm in the camp where I don't mind meetings at all, but I can be empathetic to people who hate them. Plus, Zoom meetings feel like methadone anyway. Real in-person conversation feels both better and more productive, but don't let the bosses hear me say that. They don't need any more ammo for forced RTO.
Anyway, somebody should do a study.
Anyone get the slideshow before it was taken down? Link no longer works.
I've searched everywhere and it seems gone forever. It was a hell of a slide deck and I wish I had downloaded it before it got taken down. I'd potentially pay money to see it again.
I worked for a Japanese corporation, and meetings were their DNA. Attendance at meetings conferred the ability to participate in a project, so teams would often send "placeholders." People that had no idea what the meeting was about, but their presence meant their team was represented.
It's quite common to see people sleeping in meetings, over there.
There's John Cleese's Meetings Bloody Meetings for good meeting hygiene training. Its entertaining and educational.
I would like to skip most of my meetings, but it would likely damage most of my working relationships.
Change management is the issue, not meeting management. I worked for an agency who hired productivity consultants[1] to help with meetings, email, and time management. I thought it was a very courageous choice. It’s extremely hard to measure the impact of this type of engagement, and some people hated it. The system was good though.
I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I’ve tried many productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that stuck (other than GTD).
Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a stan
The only meeting resilient to all possible outcomes is one that can easily be split. Sometimes you need to branch the timeline, and people need to talk about different things that are the right things for their priorities. In real space you can do this easily, but in tools like zoom, it needs to be blessed form above (creating breakouts).
Digital tools suck for running effective meetings that can have a branching timeline.
People attend meetings for job security, not to accomplish an agenda.
Being seen as important, is important.
You can't solve this without true ownership, and employees aren't owners.
I remember Merlin Mann, of "Inbox Zero" fame, coming to Twitter to talk about improving meetings around 2010. His list was a superset of this and forever shaped my approach to meetings. The change management part of fixing this behavior is a much heavier lift than you might expect. These are behaviors that are engrained well before the current environment.
I consider it a key part of my job to reject as many stupid meetings as I can. I accept meetings that have actual potential to change the status quo and bring progress. I choose between conflicts based on that too.
Interesting that "Small - Brainstorming" is marked as a bad meeting flavour.
I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've worked with are like this.
But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely must brainstorm then "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a brainstorming meeting.
Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse.
Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and practice most of it as well.
Should be a doc on the harder skill of how to schedule meetings, then you wouldn't need a guide on how to attend them.
Oh the magical solution to "we are having too many meetings", which is always "let's have a meeting about too many meetings".
Saw it play out in five places already, I thought a 150 year old company would be over this by now
The "recurring meeting" thing as a red flag is one that I have always used.
If I had control of the agenda, I didn't schedule recurring meetings (this includes standups). I didn't always have a choice, though.
The comments on this post are wild. Its advice. You don't need to "um actually" with every edge case you can imagine. Have your shitty meetings if you so desire.
The flow diagram for yes/no attend meeting is missing to weigh the estimated impact you can make against other meetings.
Even if I can contribute real value to 20 meetings which I am invited to, I can't attend all of them.
What’s wrong with a small brainstorming meeting?
Policy very likely enacted due to the Jeffrey Toobin incident.
Where did this come from? Source? Date (2024?)
Brian doesn't work at NYT anymore I don't think
The title card is cached by reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1pbr587/how_to_...
How to Attend Meetings
Brian Peterson
Product @ The New York Times
Does underrate discussion. Larger shifts in strategy require iterated discussion and consensus formation. Not every meeting is this, nor should it be, but this is something that is underrepresented and under respected.
They must not use scrum or safe
> If you don't schedule it, it's not real
Personally I find this kind of approach infantilizing. I don't think it's fair to have an expectation of yourself or of your colleagues to spell out in Google Calendar what you/they are spending their time doing throughout the day. People should look at gaps in people's diaries not as opportunities for new meetings, but as time someone is probably spending doing something important or interesting.
No visible file !
No file !
This was great!
It’s now gone.
I suspect The Times pulled it, after it got hugged to death.
URL has been deleted
NYTimes acts quickly!
How to Attend Meetings - Internal Guidelines from A.G. Sulzberger's Racial Science and Phrenology Blog
"Small brainstorming" is a bad meeting flavor? Not sure I agree with that. I find that brainstorming meetings with >3 people turn into trainwrecks.
Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time waste for most companies.
These slides miss most of the point of meetings. You don't just go to talk, you go to listen.
Generally if you have enough information that you know what you will share and can expect to receive at a meeting, it should be an email. People can share things on their timetable in the style they are most comfortable with and the information can be reviewed without anyone needing to worry about meeting minutes.
Even when you are uncertain exactly what will be required or gained, email is still generally the better option. People can look up the answers to questions instead of speaking off the top of their head about something they were unprepared for, and people with low stakes can skim the conversation for the bits that are relevant.
Meetings are for highly unstructured, free-form communication where you really need to talk through something. That's not to say an agenda can't be useful, but it should be nothing more than a starting point. Meandering discussions that don't really accomplish anything besides sharing information no one realized they needed are the point. If the meeting doesn't efficiently accomplish what you wanted, that's because you used the wrong tool for the job.
Meetings are best when the communication is multiplicative. For example in a brainstorming session where people build off eachother's thoughts in rapid succession. The more people contribute, the more everyone benefits. Even very low value contributions may be key catalysts. You don't get creativity and emotional investment and comradery by keeping a tight schedule.
All too often people will try to lump a bunch of different things together into a single meeting which really should be handled separately, and then try to use the agenda to recover the specificity of the various portions of the meeting. This never works well. Because everything gets improperly handled in one meeting, you need more meetings to revisit the various parts, and oftentimes those too have other things mixed in. Often you'll have a meeting to prepare for the meeting with a select group, and a meeting to follow up the meeting with a different select group, and of course the results of these meetings beget even more meetings. The ubiquitous feeling that a meeting was useless is almost always because you had a legitimately useful reason for holding or attending the meeting that was not accomplished. You don't fix this by holding better organized meetings, you fix this by eliminating the need for these meetings.
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As an aside, I find it funny that there is a slide stating meeting attendance is a choice and then a subsequent slide listing optional meetings as a red flag.
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