
Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings - remyp
https://execution.com/free-meeting-stats/
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vvoyer
Side note, they could definitely enhance the tool by computing most of the
data client side using a google calendar export. So nothing would ever go to
their servers:
[https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37111?hl=en](https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37111?hl=en)

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vvoyer
Very well done, I always wanted to build a similar product. But all of those
tools are always missing the most important feature from my POV: company wide
statistics on meetings:

\- % of meetings per employees in time (i.e. are we more and more spending
time in meetings since we are growing)

\- automatic employees group diagram/relations computation based on meetings
invites

\- who's never in meetings (who's being solo)

\- who's always in meetings

\- % meetings without a clear agenda

\- % of recurring meetings ("bad") vs one-offs (ok)

\- meeting duration statistics

\- external vs internal attendees

\- anything else?

All of those company wide metrics would be gold for any execs willing to
understand why are we slowing down on delivery or just having a clear overview
of the organisation and how they collaborate.

Even for sales organisation this could be beneficial for tracking performance
and suggesting strategies.

If I want to know if I am spending too much time in meetings, I just have to
look at my calendar and own gut feeling. But if I want to know it for the
whole company, I have not easy data point.

This startup had some meeting analytics tooling: [https://medium.com/startup-
grind/startup-mortality-what-end-...](https://medium.com/startup-
grind/startup-mortality-what-end-of-life-care-teaches-us-about-startup-
failure-7d568c736d90). But they stopped (maybe they should have focused ONLY
on that).

If anyone would be interested to build ^, ping me at wouaren@gmail.com

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Jb6
This is basically what OrgVue does.

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vvoyer
Thanks for OrgVue, been searching for this kind of tool for long time!

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remyp
OP here, happy to answer your questions! Most importantly:

We take privacy very seriously, none of your calendar data is stored, just
tabulated, and as soon as we finish we remove the token so we can't access
anything in the future. The ONLY thing we store is the tabulation and your
email address (which is not made public) tied to that tabulation.

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Signez
If you really care about our privacy that much, please configure the GDPR
popup in a way[0] that let your EU visitors to say that they are not allowing
third party usage of their personal data.

[0] [https://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/techradar-
gdpr/](https://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/techradar-gdpr/)

~~~
bwb
OP here, ya that shouldn't be. We used a GDPR service called ShareThis.com and
I will check that as we do not share that with any 3rd party.

[Update] - We are only doing 1st party consent so I will email their support
to find out what the heck is going on with it showing that.

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vintagedave
FYI: the button has only I Accept and Customize options; that may violate the
GDPR by not providing a No option.

When you click Customize, and manually turn off all options, the very next
page you visit will show you the GDPR prompt again - and again. This
definitely violates the consent statutes.

Please let your provider know so they can fix this bug, and on either their or
your side, provide an option for a clear No button, or at the very least a
quick way to disable all.

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JoshMandel
Very cool -- I love the focus and the amount of information you can glean from
calendar analysis.

On this topic, since I joined Microsoft this summer, one of the off-the-shelf
tools I've been most impressed with is the MyAnalytics dashboard
([https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-
analytics/myanaly...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-
analytics/myanalytics/use/dashboard)) built into Office online. I like that in
addition to meetings, it also summarizes time spent on email and time spent
working outside of "business hours" \-- and decorates each stat with
benchmarks to compare with company averages.

I also appreciate the claim that "Only you have access to your MyAnalytics
dashboard. MyAnalytics does not provide your manager or anyone else in your
organization access to your dashboard." (Of course if push comes to shove,
this is all company data, but I like that it's only shown to me by policy.)

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webwright
This was (originally) exactly why we created RescueTime (YC08 - and still
growing!). We'd sold a tiny/new startup that we'd created IN ALASKA to a
large/overfunded startup (150ppl) in Seattle. We were convinced we were moving
to the big leagues. Everyone would be so smart! We'd move 10x faster will the
big league technology/processes!

The reality was pretty terrible-- I felt like the entire company spent all day
writing emails, going to meetings, and updating wikis... Which seemed pretty
scary for a company that hadn't figured out its own product yet. We wanted a
big chart showing the allocation of time spend so we could show it the exec
team and say, "Is this on purpose?"

The company ended up raising $50M and selling for less than $1M. The founder
went on to create Fab.com, which raised $300M+ and sold for $15M.

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StavrosK
Sorry, I'm kind of confused by the timeline. Which company was which? You say
RescueTime is still growing, but then said it was sold for $1M? I think I
misunderstood.

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quasse
I think he's saying that he created RescueTime as a reaction to the experience
he's detailing in the comment (post Alaska startup).

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rob-d
I like this a lot.

A similar thing which I'm interested in tracking is the impact of meetings on
flow state. I wonder if it would be helpful to have a more nuanced way for
"makers" to protect their flow state time than having to block out their
calendar for hours / days at a time. I envisage a system where a meeting
booker is able to make the decision - "Is the meeting important enough to
curtail or split this person's flow state?".

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voxmatt
Rob, I was so sick of this that I started a company around it! We're still
early, but what Clockwise does is pretty magical: we rearrange meetings to
protect flow state. If you ever want to share feedback or give product ideas,
feel free to reach out: matt [] getclockwise.com

[https://www.getclockwise.com/product](https://www.getclockwise.com/product)

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agotterer
Just this morning I spent an hour reviewing my calendar and all my direct
reports calendars. I then tried to manually optimize when we had meetings to
allow them to have the most focus time. I did this by scheduling at the starts
and end of the day as well as clustering meetings. Wish I knew about
clockwise! I’ll have to check it out.

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voxmatt
Ha, yes; I've been there many times before!

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prepend
This is cool, but no way am I granting access to a years worth of calendar.

I like how they describe their usage and that they auto remove access. But
even if I believe them, there are many errors that would expose hundreds of
email, contact info, and docs.

I wish they had a scrubber utility I run and can remove unnecessary data. They
should not need pii for their stats.

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reaperducer
_This is cool, but no way am I granting access to a years worth of calendar._

I know everything has to be an online web "app" these days, but the privacy
concerns could be completely eliminated by simply making this an actual
computer program.

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Vinnl
Because a computer program cannot send your private data elsewhere?

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deaps
I don't think the fear is necessarily purposeful, malicious intent. I think
it's more about _accidentally_ storing something you didn't mean to or
_accidentally_ leaking something, with all of the best intents.

The OP seams sincere and honest, but leaks happen on projects with multi-
million dollar security teams/budgets.

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dotBen
Even with the promise that they'll delete the data after, it doesn't seem like
a reasonable value exchange.

I would assume that meta-data and derived data is still going to be preserved.
This looks like it's lead-gen for a future service they are building.

~~~
bwb
We do not keep any meta-data or derived data, we literally tabulate the
numbers you see on that screen and just store that and the email it is run
with. Plus we kill off the token afterwards. So the only place personal data
would be is the memory until it is cleared.

We did this for fun, as a proof of concept for a paid saas idea, and because
it might be a good lead gen source down the road. Our hope is people can use
this to show their boss the pain meeting madness is causing, and what is
preventing them from ___making_ __. :)

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redhale
This is awesome!

I can't really use it though, since I often schedule "heads-down" sessions for
myself (ironically because of meeting overload). I hope a future version
allows me to add a text filter rule of some kind to exclude them.

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remyp
This is something we've heard from a lot of people, and we account for it.
Meetings that only include yourself aren't counted in the stats.

~~~
redhale
Oh, awesome!

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chase-seibert
I’ve build a similar tool for a hackathon. What we found when we rolled this
out to the whole company was that as soon as they saw the data for other
people, they stopped worrying that we had a culture of too many meetings.

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amirathi
Nice! Meeting hell is a fantastic problem to take on.

In the same vein, please consider generating stats for slack and other chat
app usage as well. Would be very valuable to clearly see it's impact on roles
primarily hired for building things.

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jeffreym
Very interesting. Despite thinking I knew how much time I spent in meetings, I
was still surprised by the stats.

I like what was said by rob-d about flow state. There's a lot of ancillary
"stuff" attached to meetings - anticipation, preparation, transportation,
decompression, etc. Add the actual time in-meeting, and you have a proper
interruption.

Creating some variety of "meeting gravity," which would pull in, combine, or
group other meetings contiguously would be welcome, particularly amongst those
who are sensitive to interruptions in flow.

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double0jimb0
Very interesting. Any ideas on how to quantify productivity of the meetings?
Insights into efficiency of a meeting would be helpful as well.

~~~
bwb
Yep, we are currently doing a ton of customer dev interviews for the paid
version which is aimed at teams and/or the entire business. Part of what we
are testing is spending 30 seconds at the end of each meeting to rate the
meeting and using that to diagnose the specific dysfunction it had. We use
that to learn about the specific dysfunctions inside teams, departments, and
the entire organization. Then we fix that with software driven coaching,
optional human coaching, and showing the damage to "makers" through analytics
(and possibly peer pressure).

We also have some crazier ideas we are testing such as allowing
teams/businesses to do things like: \- Block entire days or blocks of time
from allowing meetings. \- Require an agenda/purpose to a meeting 24 hours
ahead of time or killing the meeting. \- Setting a max time for meetings and
if someone makes one for over a threshold we split it into two meetings to
change the psychology and trying to finish it quickly. \- Emailing the creator
of the meeting the real cost of inviting so many people and asking them to
verify it has value to the organization. \- Tools to allow management/teams to
kill off meetings that don't meet their criteria. Such as killing off all
recurring meetings that are not 1v1, or setting hard limits on what % of your
time is spent in meetings per job title.

Basically a lot of ways to hard enforce good meeting culture... it might sound
a bit draconian but I think we have all had the pain of being in a culture
that doesn't know it has a meeting problem.

~~~
woah
A lot of these are pretty drastic... not sure I'd want to commit to them
without really talking it over with the team and getting all the stakeholders
involved

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shoo
maybe we should set up a first session within the team to outline the problem,
then a second session to plan who is going to reach out and meet with the
various stakeholders in other teams, then another session to aggregate
feedback from that first round of consultations has completed.

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osrec
This looks cool. Just wondering, how do you define a meeting? Is it any
calendar entry with multiple attendees?

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remyp
Yep! We throw out anything over 8 hours long as well.

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thoughtpalette
We built something at a previous company's hack days that was somewhat
similar. We were sick of being in meetings when we didn't need to be.

[http://gotclocked.com/](http://gotclocked.com/)

Angular.js Mandrill email API

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sj3k
The place I work just wrapped up a white label project for your previous
company. Small world.

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igetspam
It'd be nice to be able to change the average salary. This is HN, which means
many of us are in tech jobs and the tech sector. Using 60k/year doesn't really
do it justice.

I like it though. If nothing else, it's sad fun.

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binarymax
I would have loved to have this in my previous job. I estimate I was in
meetings about 20 hours per week, of which 8 hours were actually useful. Glad
I'm not in that situation anymore! Nice project.

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madrox
I think anyone ever frustrated with their calendar has fantasized about
building this, but I don't think it'll go well if you ever actually crunch
these numbers and show them to your boss.

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screaminghawk
This is the kind of tool I've been tossing up making myself. Such a great job!
Quick, well presented.

But, I wish I could correct the statistics.

* I haven't had this email for a year (doesn't extrapolate)

* My salary is much higher than $60k

* I work a 37.5 hour week

Also a way to combine meetings across my multiple email addresses would be
icing on the cake.

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bwb
Thanks or the feedback! Do you mean you have other calendars shared on this
account you want this to pick up? Let me know a little there and thanks once
again for the feedback :)

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o_____________o
This is hilarious. Maybe make a portal for this that just includes a live
counter for value lost based on average salaries x people in the room = $$
being spent. That would be a great passive aggressive thing to throw up on
your laptop and aim toward the room.

~~~
akx
Once upon a time, I actually live-coded this during the time it took for
people to set up a video call. I think it took about 30 minutes to get
everyone online.

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xfactor973
Tried it out because this looks really useful however it hangs forever. >1hr I
let it spin. Not sure exactly what happened.

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imhoguy
I would need something like that to measure life spend in Slack channels and
DMs. At least with a real meeting, a call or an ad-hoc talk you could focus on
the one only, but forget it on Slack.

