
Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die - karterk
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/meetings-where-work-goes-to-die.html
======
amirmc
Fabulous post. I get tired of folks complaining about 'meetings' when they've
never made the effort to hold a good/efficient one.

One additional point I would add is that there _really should_ be someone in
the role of Chair (e.g if there are more then 3/4 people taking part). The
Chair's only job is to make sure things stick to time and the important points
get covered. It doesn't have to be the 'boss', even though people expect it to
be.

I used to chair lots of meetings and while my style used to come across as a
bit militant, after a few sessions people could be assured of the following.
(1) Timing was followed (i.e start _and_ end on time). (2) If someone was
specifically asked to be there, it was because their input was _needed_. (3)
There was always an agenda and we'd _stick to it_.

Although I felt like a bully at first, people did seem to appreciate this
style after a while. Folks would arrive (on time), discuss/decide stuff
quickly and then get on with their lives.

Meetings are just something else you have to _learn about_ if you want to do
them well.

~~~
bwarp
That's all fine and dandy but after time, people tend to stop inviting you if
you are assertive and only invite people who will blindly support their ideas.

~~~
amirmc
I think you've missed my point. The assertiveness was valued and only had to
be applied to time-keeping and focus.

Evidence that it was valued is that people started behaving differently,
meetings ran efficiently and some folks would occasionally thank me.

------
edw519
6\. No chairs. People will soon learn to focus on what must be done and skip
all the B.S. before they get tired.

7\. No cell phones or laptops. People must focus on the task at hand and
nothing else.

8\. Lock the door at the start time and don't unlock it for anyone. People
will soon learn to show up on time.

9\. Designate a referee to say "One at a time," "Take that off-line," or "So
what?" Amazing how well kindergarten rules still work.

10\. Kill anyone who says any of these words or phrases: scope, mission, best
practices, teaching moment, outside the box, domain, tangent, or <x> is the
new <y>.

~~~
tomjen3
If the door to a meeting is ever locked, I would assume that they could get by
without me and never show up for a meeting on that subject again.

Also when should the referee say 'so what'? Whenever somebody complains?
Because in a company which needs these rules, that is the only thing that
right will be used for.

~~~
mcantor
> _If the door to a meeting is ever locked, I would assume that they could get
> by without me and never show up for a meeting on that subject again._

Unless it was a meeting that you wanted, or needed, to be there for!

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potatolicious
I'm going to venture and add one more that I find relevant for myself and the
people I work with:

\- If the meeting involves creatives (coders, designers, graphics, etc), shove
them all towards one day of the week, or one time of the day.

One of my pet peeves about my last job was that PMs and managers felt free to
book meetings at any damn time of the day. If I have a half-hour gap between
meeting A and meeting B, I won't get _anything_ done. It got so bad in "crunch
time" (when everyone wanted updates on everything) that work practically
stopped. My day was 4 hours of meetings interspersed with complete and utterly
wasted time.

Creatives need significant stretches of time to actually get anything done.
Book your meetings around these.

~~~
herge
PG describes this very well: <http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

------
jacques_chester
What strikes me about this list is how it basically renames stuff that already
exists. I'm about to sound like I'm about 60, but please, bear with me.

 _Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement ... I hesitate
to recommend having an "agenda" and "agenda items" because the word agenda
implies a giant, tedious bulleted list of things to cover._

Yet an agenda is the best tool for controlling meetings if the chair is any
good. It says "this is what we will discuss and decide and _only_ this". A
meeting should not be a free-form discussion -- leave that for chance
encounters in the office kitchen. It's a transactional form of communication,
a tool to make efficiently make collective decisions.

 _Do your homework before the meeting._

Which is why agenda are circulated -- and even more because:

 _Make it optional._

Yes! And as Tom DeMarco points out in (I believe) _The Deadline_ , meetings
which don't stick to the agenda lead inevitably to everyone having to come to
every single meeting _just in case something gets decided_. If the agenda is
trustworthy, people will stay away who should stay away; only interested
parties -- who will do the homework because it's relevant to them -- will turn
up.

 _Summarize to-dos at the end of the meeting._

These are called "minutes". Properly written minutes are very useful and they
don't have to be in legalese. The University Computer Club at the University
of Western Australia, where I studied, have excellent minutes[1], written with
a sense of humour.

Before I came to my senses, I used to be involved in student politics. And if
that unpleasant experience taught me anything, it was the power of meeting
mechanics. A well-run meeting is an extremely useful institution. Get in,
discuss, decide, get out. Bam. No ambiguity, nothing left hanging.

As a chair there is one rule that counts: don't let the meeting get side-
tracked. Stick to the agenda, work it. People quickly learn that they need to
get their stuff onto the agenda in advance and the whole process begins to
work better. Discussions become more focused, decisions can be made quickly
and efficiently.

Those who are interested might like to join an organisation like Toastmasters
or the Penguin Club to hone their skills, or get involved in committee work,
or join a union, incorporated club or political branch. The skills of running
an effective meeting are very useful. I applied them during my capstone unit
at uni; my team delivered 92% of agreed functionality on-time with no
significant defects. And part of that was running tight meetings.

[1] <http://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/minutes/2011/>

~~~
DanBC
Wait, 'minutes' are a record of what was said by who at the meeting. 'actions'
(or 'actionable items' or etc) are "to dos". These need to be highlighted
separately from the minutes.

I agree with you that well run meetings are crucial, and that traditional
formats can be excellent. I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some
people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs
and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done.

~~~
jacques_chester
Meeting formats vary. The simplest things you need, though are:

1\. Metadata -- who was there, start time, end time.

2\. What was discussed. Regular reports are typical.

3\. What decisions were made.

4\. Who will carry out which decisions.

It's common to see 3&4 in one of two formats:

1\. Interpolated. "Motion: Jack to install new monitoring package. Moved Jill,
Seconded Wei Li. Passed."

2\. Appended. A list at the bottom of "action items". The UCC minutes I linked
above take this approach, which has the readability advantage.

 _I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some people are great at setting
agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at
actually getting any work done._

Yes, absolutely. I saw meetings abused during my student politics days. Some
really dramatic stuff.

~~~
amirmc
Another, often overlooked point is _when_ things need to be done by.

Also, I got in the habit of putting a table of actions right at the front of
the minutes (after the preamble of time/date/attendees etc). It was the first
thing people would see on opening the doc.

~~~
jacques_chester
That's a nifty idea. Mind if I pinch it in future?

~~~
amirmc
I'm flattered. Below is an (anonymised) example of the last set of minutes I
took. Hope you find it useful.

PDF: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.pdf>

DOC: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.doc>

Edit: I once toyed with the idea of trying to write an iPad app that can
automagically structure a set of minutes for you. It would have been a way for
me to learn iOS and do something useful for myself at the time.

~~~
jacques_chester
Excellent example document.

I toyed with a similar idea for an application, but this was about a decade
ago when my (most excellent) secretary grumbled about my nitpicking.

------
theneb
One of the points nearly covered in the article is not going off track, as
soon as people get comfortable and start discussing things off topic then the
meeting is over as it is no longer productive.

The ethos of standing meetings is pretty good, nobody can get comfortable and
decisions are made quickly. To this end meetings ARE useful in some
situations, topic for discussion should be circulated prior and agreement made
in the meeting. As you don't want to fall into the trap of long email threads
between co-workers which could be solved with a few minutes of discussion.

------
bradt
This article and the 37S "meetings are toxic"
(<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php>) argument
really speaks to designers/developers who have worked at an agency. In my
experience, many agency meetings attempt to get work done. Most of the
thinking happens during the meeting resulting in poorly thought out, off the
cuff suggestions. Sure preparation is important, but more specifically most of
the thinking should happen before the meeting. The meeting itself should only
be about sharing and reacting to that sharing.

Every time I need to communicate something, I stop and ask myself, what level
of interruption does my message warrant? An email? IM? A meeting? It's very
rare that it will save time to bypass email and IM for a meeting. Meetings
because project managers want to spend less time in email and IM is
unacceptable.

------
frou_dh
I don't mind a few scheduled meetings a week. I don't know about you, but I
don't flat-out work the entire time I'm sitting at a desk, so not being there
every so often isn't necessarily a productivity hit.

Obviously unfocused and overly general meetings are not good, but for
reasonable ones, I find taking the headphones off and going to speak/listen to
some human beings for a while to be rejuvenating.

~~~
lparry
As a counterpoint, I find myself thoroughly drained after any meeting that
goes for an hour or more. Put me in a two hour meeting first thing in the
morning and I'm not going to produce anything useful that day; I'll pretty
much be zombified for the rest of the day.

I figure it comes down to extroverts (recharged by interacting with others) vs
introverts (drained by interacting with others).

~~~
frou_dh
I think everyone should agree that marathon meetings suck. Perhaps 45m max,
with people free to leave if it's no longer relevant to them, is what I'd
advocate.

I thought my word choice might bring up the intro/extro-vert thing, but I
think someone needs to be a pretty extreme case to be flustered by a
(reasonable length) meeting with people they already know and hopefully like.
I don't really buy it.

------
rumblestrut
My meeting rules are simple.

1\. I don't go to a meeting that doesn't have an agenda.

2\. After I get the agenda, I try and work out what I can over email and
phone, if possible.

3\. If I can't get out of the meeting following step two, I let the meeting
organizer know I'm available for 45 minutes at the maximum.

4\. I leave at 45 minutes regardless if the meeting is done or not.

These principles have served me well.

------
bwarp
I have found that meetings are where people who "can't" congregate in great
numbers to tell those who "can" how to do stuff wrongly.

~~~
lnanek
Hahaha, yeah. I've had managers call meetings before at a past place I worked,
with the result already decided beforehand of course, just because they
couldn't take ten minutes to read a code review thread or lookup the
difference between two protocols online. It wasn't enough to program it right
there, you had to program it and hide anything the manager couldn't understand
and would get upset about.

------
MrFoof
In the last month, I attended fifty hours of meetings. Fifty. In the last week
before I gave my notice, the week had seventeen hours of meetings.

It's not just where work goes to die, it's also a great way to drive
individuals out of a company who just want to do good work. Meetings were
exactly why we were missing deadlines and were forced to deliver assets that
were lower quality because we didn't have the time (thanks to meetings) to do
anything right. Meeting-itis is like dropping a nuclear bomb on the morale of
some of your team members.

Moreover, I'm convinced the reason why projects might devolve into meeting-
itis is because none of the attendees can agree on A) what is to be done B) or
how to do it. In which, since no one's yet done the legwork to get all that
sorted out, there should be no meetings until said A and B have been
established and taken care of.

------
topherjaynes
I literally had no meetings yesterday and felt that the lack of constraints on
the day led me to be even less productivy. Think there is a fine balance of
meetings to break up the day and give direction (maybe just talking with co-
workers) and utter freedom. The latter feels too much like a study hall.

------
franze
worse then meetings: Skype-Calls (or even Group-Skype-Calls)

there is no agenda, there is no reason (mission statement), nobody prepares
for anything (they are googling it during the call), it is not optional (they
just call you), everything is summarized in an email afterwards, the email
does not differ in any way from the email you would have written without the
skype call.

some clients prefer to meet me before i start working for them (not going to
happen) - the next thing is they want a skype video chat (not going to happen,
i work naked) - then audio (hey, i'm online with a mobile data stick, not
going to happen) - then they want a skype chat session ... i'm yet looking for
arguments against chat sessions.

i once uninstalled skype, but the argument "i don't have skype" didn't
work....

~~~
kscaldef
IMO, Skype calls follow the same rules as phone calls. You're not required to
answer.

------
the_mat
This list reads exactly like advice from business books from the 1970s or
earlier. And I mean _exactly_. No deviation. Nothing new.

Clearly there's more to the meeting issue or people wouldn't be shouting the
same advice into the wind 40+ years later.

------
cs702
On the other hand, the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School
are conducting a study about how executives use their time -- see
<http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/executivetimeuse/> \-- and so far they have found
CEOs spend around a third of their time in meetings!

Here's a good summary:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020464260457721...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204642604577215013504567548.html)

~~~
GFischer
That's because they're not "makers", as someone pointed in the thread, PG has
an essay titled Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule :

<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

------
jorleif
While I certainly agree with many of the OPs points about how to make meetings
work better, I sometimes suspect that the reason a lot of people dislike
meetings is not just that they are ineffective, but rather that they feel
unpleasant. Deciding something collectively with a group of three or more
people really is much easier if the stakeholders are present, than over email
or phone. But in a meeting you get all kinds of nasty conflicts between
people, the consequent avoiding difficult but relevant issues,
misunderstandings, conflicting mental models, boredom etc. Meetings don't feel
nice for these reasons, but I would like to hear something that truly works
better. Sure, if the proverbial Steve decides everything, then why have
meetings (you only need to meet Steve once in a while), but is that really how
you want things to be?

------
tlogan
Meetings are important - but they need to be correctly organized, led and
moderated are very beneficial.

Not having meetings for things you should have a meeting is very dangerous -
and making some stupid rules like no chairs or lock the doors is also
dangerous. You see, you need these stupid things because people organizing
meetings don't know how to organize, prepare, led and moderate a meeting:
spend some time coaching younger employee to learn how to do that (ha coaching
... that is something we really forget to do because it is not writing code)

In other words, meetings are not bad: people organizing, preparing, leading,
and moderating meetings are bad.

The hardest meeting to lead are "brainstorming meetings" and I was lucky that
my EVP was master of them: many interesting and break-thru algorithm happend
there.

------
jrockway
The main problem I notice with meetings is that it's hard to get a chance to
talk, and so when people do get a chance to talk, they keep talking to avoid
pausing long enough for someone else to step in. I also hate the war between
people trying to start talking, involving two people talking over each other
until one admits defeat and yields the floor.

This is ten times worse with video conferencing.

One thing that surprised me about Google is that we have meetings and they
proceed in exactly the same way every single time. The end result is a bunch
of angry engineers, not new ideas.

~~~
jacques_chester
That's why many organisations adopt rules of order.

Silent air is a poor medium of transmission. In order to efficiently multiplex
communication, you need a good protocol. That's what rules of order do: they
impose a protocol between the participants that establishes who can speak
when, and on what topic.

It's fusty and old fashioned, but it _works_. I've seen absolute screaming
matches that nevertheless 1) reached conclusions and 2) were legally valid.
The chair had to constantly shut down the screaming, had to evict several
troublemakers from the meeting and to follow the rules with tyrannical
strictness, _but it worked_.

That's almost the worst case possible for a meeting (the worst is descent into
riot). Rules of order, like any technology, work well if properly applied.

------
tintin
More tips:

    
    
      * Always stand-up while meeting.
      * Not everyone can lead a meeting. Ask someone how can to lead the meeting. This can even be someone without interest in the subject.

~~~
lysium
How are you supposed to take notes in a stand-up meeting?

------
ThomPete
I have a very simple rule for meetings.

I ask:"Am I needed" and if the answer is yes I ask: "For what?"

After that it's pretty easy to figure out whether I should go or not. The
important part is to realize that YOU are the judge of whether your presence
is needed, not your PM or any other.

I think I have dodged probably 80% of meetings that way and I know I have not
missed out on a single thing ever.

I also make the habit of showing up when I need and leave again when I am not
needed.

~~~
DanBC
That's rational advice. In a perfect world there would be no problems with it.

How do you deal with irrational humans who attach a bunch of unintended
meaning to your actions? For example, some people will think you are arrogant,
or rude, or uncooperative. I know you're not, you know you're not, but how do
you persuade them that you're just being efficient?

~~~
ThomPete
I don't care about it.

Why should I? If I work at a place where thats an issue I shouldn't work there
anyway cause that means the place is going to be a place I want to leave
sooner rather than later.

------
atomicdog
Meetings bloody meetings:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYnVt-umSA>

------
mbesto
In case anyone is interested I wrote a blog post about conducting 15-minute
meetings. Ever since I've introduced them, they've been quite successful for
us.

[http://www.techdisruptive.com/2011/05/10/the-15-minute-
meeti...](http://www.techdisruptive.com/2011/05/10/the-15-minute-meeting/)

------
Havoc
>Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement.

People who use the term "mission statement" are usually people of the meeting
holding variety. That and memorandum of understanding, vision etc.

------
funkah
The anti-meeting attitude has pervaded my workplace to the point that we don't
have meetings for things we really should. It's a strange feeling to wish for
more meetings.

For a while, we had a scrum master contracting with us that ran meetings with
an iron fist. She didn't take any bullshitting or digressing from the point.
It was awesome. I miss her all the time.

------
vacri
Every rule has an exception, and mine is the first rule - the one 'not to be
broken under penalty of death'. At my workplace we have contractors that come
and go, plus the in-house devs are frequently offsite. It's really difficult
to get all the stakeholders together at once, and while long meetings aren't
common, it definitely occurs that we have 60+ minute meetings that are full of
content.

Also, rule 4 doesn't make sense for two reasons. The first is that the idea of
a stand-up meeting is that it's mandatory: get everyone together to quickly
thrash out what's blocking them. Just because you're not blocked doesn't mean
you're not blocking someone else, plus it helps keep everyone on the same
page. Secondly, the rule contradicts itself - meetings aren't mandatory,
unless you _need_ to be there. So... you don't have to be there, unless you
have to be there, in which case you have to be there?

------
nknight
Being prepared for a meeting means the meeting should never take place at all.

If you know what you're going to say, put it in a damned email. If I have a
question, I'll reply. Then you can craft a thoughtful and correct answer as
time allows while consulting any necessary reference material, instead of
talking out of your ass.

You also look cool by violating the laws of physics. People don't have to
actually attend a "meeting" to be there, they just have to _gasp_ read their
email! Amazing!

~~~
nodata
The goal of an efficient meeting is the rapid discussion of ideas to reach a
consensus.

E-mail is dreadful for anything that tends to go off-course (needs to be
chaired) or requires rapid discussion with evolving arguments.

~~~
smackfu
I can only imagine the same people who are saying meetings are terrible are
also the ones saying "why doesn't anyone respond to my emails quickly???"

~~~
nknight
Hardly. I'm the one constantly wondering why people didn't read the email I
sent them _before_ interrupting me with redundant questions that were
thoroughly answered in the email.

------
rodolphoarruda
this is completely off topic here. I don't mind if you down vote, but every
time I read "codinghorror.com" I remember Woody Allen's "Whatever Works" main
character who wakes up in the middle of the night screaming at the top of his
lungs: "the horror!! the horror!!"

