
What we get wrong about meetings, and how to make them worth attending - 80mph
http://timharford.com/2019/08/what-we-get-wrong-about-meetings-and-how-to-make-them-worth-attending/
======
weixiyen
For every meeting I create since it takes up people's time, on google calendar
I put 2 things in the description:

1\. Purpose

2\. Agenda

Purpose makes me think - is this meeting necessary? - and also answers why we
are having this meeting.

Agenda gives others context on what to expect within the meeting as topics of
discussion, as well as clarifies the format of engagement.

~~~
gwbas1c
I started declining small meetings that don't meet this bar. First, I'll reply
with, "what's your agenda." If I get a flippant answer, I decline. It pisses
my boss off, but it's extremely effective.

Flippant answer: "I'd like to talk to you about [product / project / job
title]"

~~~
wry_discontent
I would like to do something like that, but I don't feel like I could get away
with it.

I'd get a follow up email with something like "You have to come. It's your
job."

How do people pull off stuff like this?

~~~
telchar
You could try reversing that and asking them to set an agenda before you a
accept the meeting. Keep asking specific questions if needed. If they won't
answer, you can pull the "it's your job" card on them.

I make no warranty on this method however, just a thought.

------
drchewbacca
Isn't there some fundamental mathematical structure here which makes these
problems unsolvable?

Like imagine 20 robots all trying to do some task, each one learning
information as it goes. How much time should they spend doing the task vs how
much time should they spend communicating with the other robots? (Assuming
they are restricted to one or the other)

It's not really a solvable question. It's possible some other robot has a
piece of information that would make you much more efficient, however you
can't know if they have that information without asking them.

It's possible that taking the piece of information you just learned and
gathering all the robots and sharing it with them will help many of them
become more efficient, however you don't know if that's true unless you try
it.

How can one of the robots work out the value of a piece of information to
another robot? Surely all you can do is estimate?

Clearly 0% communication and 100% communication are terrible ideas. However
working out which pieces of information to communicate and when is not
particularly optimisable, you just have to muddle through as best you can.

~~~
otabdeveloper4
> Isn't there some fundamental mathematical structure here which makes these
> problems unsolvable?

No. Meetings are easy to fix, there's just three simple steps:

a) There must be a point-by-point agenda before the meeting.

b) During the meeting there's somebody to take notes and keep the meeting on
topic of the agenda.

c) After a meeting there must be a post-meeting report.

Unfortunately doing it right is a bureaucratic bummer that most people don't
like.

~~~
username90
Structured meetings only communicate information collectively known to be
important. Information you didn't know needed to be communicated is often the
most important part of meetings, so having meetings meant to be "derailed" is
useful.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Structured meetings only communicate information collectively known to be
> important._

Meetings with rules of order aren't meant for communicating information
(that's what documents are for), their purpose is to make decisions
efficiently.

That's why you have an agenda (what will be discussed and decided), have a
chairperson (to ensure the meeting remains on-topic and follows the rules) and
keep minutes (so there is a record of what was decided).

When someone comes with new information ("derails") it's perfectly acceptable
to take that into account and move a replacement motion, or push it into the
next agenda, spin off a delegated group etc. Any widely-used rules of order
include numerous mechanisms for dealing with new information arising during
the meeting.

But the general point is that meeting is only competent to _decide_ what is
_in the agenda_ and decisions only exist if they are _in the minutes_. If you
don't have that ironclad rule than everyone will need to turn up for every
meeting, just in case a decision they care about is made. And then turn up for
every meeting ever after, because no meetings are final. And argue about what
was actually decided.

Rules of order get a bad rap for the same reason as static typing and
relational databases: they seem stuffy and slow. But they exist for a good
reason and in the long run they are going to be more efficient than making it
up as you go.

~~~
roenxi
> their purpose is to make decisions efficiently.

Just underlining this a few times; a meeting is a forum for decisions to be
made. If a meeting is used to communicate information then that is a very poor
use of meeting time. In some cases, one person is making the decision without
input and giving stakeholders an opportunity to stand up and object now; but
that is subtly different from communicating information.

Honestly I was almost tempted to copy Jacques' entire comment for emphasis;
the rules of order are all critical to making decisions and are all essential
to a good meeting. Particularly having an agenda.

------
smcameron
One thing I immediately noticed about meetings at Google is there'd invariably
be a shared google doc for the agenda and meeting notes. There's not just one
person taking notes trying to capture what happened, everybody just jumps in
and updates the doc all at the same time. Huge time saver and a revelation
compared to what I'd seen at previous jobs. I've since introduced this idea
elsewhere to great effect.

~~~
smn1234
any suggestions on what to use if Google Doc isn't permitted for use within an
Enterprise? What tool and configuration can enable this?

~~~
remram
If seen whiteboards used for this, by people not knowledgeable enough to setup
something like Doc (or rather, not organized enough to set it up in advance).

Then someone snaps a picture and sends it around.

------
vertak
This is one of the most succinct ruminations on meetings and I agree with
almost every point. Meetings are obviously useful, but they are difficult
because there are many ways to do meeting poorly and few know what steps they
need to take to ensure meetings are good.

I’ve often thought that attaching a price to meetings would help prompt the
question of why this meeting is worth $X of the company’s dime. At the very
least it would decrease needless invitees and give some ammunition to the call
for higher value meetings.

~~~
hanniabu
Alternatively you can have only standing meetings. That usually helps reduce
wasted time and stay succinct and effective from my experience.

~~~
cbanek
I wish I could say that was my experience. I had a daily scrum meeting for
about a year that had at least 15 people, and everyone would take their turn
to talk about each post-it note on the board. After standing for about half an
hour, it gets really old. Nobody cared what anyone else was saying other than
the one manager. When we tried to break it up, the manager said it was more
efficient if we were all there at the same time. It might have even been true
- for him.

~~~
mamon
Just think of such meeting as a paid break: check your phone for emails, catch
up with Facebook friends, order some things from Amazon, or just let your mind
wander. This way no meeting would be "a waste of time" :)

Personally, I've been working as contractor/consultant for the last 8 years,
getting paid by the hour worked, so I grew to like those pointless meetings,
because they simply are easy money: they count as work, but require almost no
effort on my side.

~~~
SkyBelow
>Just think of such meeting as a paid break

If you are paid salary and having to work any overtime, then it is likely
taking up productive time and resulting in more unpaid overtime. If you are
hourly, then I think that mentality works fine. I wonder if the different
incentives every cause a problem in work places with both types of workers.

------
rocelot
Wow this article/discussion hits close to home - I work at a startup that's
trying to tackle the ineffective/unnecessary meeting problem - we've got a
Slack app that syncs with your calendar and sends out pulse surveys after
certain meetings, then provides a dashboard for surfacing anonymous feedback
and insights.

At first I didn’t really grok the problem - I’m used to working at small
companies with small teams where bad meetings are pretty obvious and easy to
deal with, but after seeing and hearing all the stories from people at the
companies that participated in our beta it’s become pretty clear to me the
scope of it - it really is an ongoing unsolved issue.

We’re testing different features and approaches and trying to figure out what
works/doesn’t work - we’ve got a feature in the works which is like a “meeting
exploder” where if enough people in a scheduled meeting don’t think it should
happen it can get cancelled or at least reevaluated - we’re trying to make it
sort of fun and easy for meeting attendees to give feedback, while still
getting enough data that a host or team lead can see whether their meeetings
are actually providing value or even need to happen in the first place etc.

It’s early days for us but we've gotten a ton of good feedback already - we’re
still working out the kinks but it’s pretty validating to hear about all these
teams and people still struggling with “the meeting problem”. We could always
use more companies testing early versions too and providing feedback on what
kind of features they like/don’t like so if you're on Slack and it’s something
you or your team might be interested in give a shout - I'll post a link too,
please don't be mad - [https://getmarlo.com](https://getmarlo.com)

------
Balanceinfinity
The most important thing a meeting can have is an agenda - what will be
discussed and by whom. The second thing is a clock. Almost nothing productive
ever happens in the second hour of a meeting (unless a long meeting was
planned because of the complexity of the issues). If mission creep expands the
needs, schedule a new meeting to discuss the added items. The third is a
leader - not to control the content, but to ensure that the participants stick
to whatever the subject of the meeting. Once they start telling war stories
about their prior employer and why the left, someone needs to gently move
things along. In the military, they often do stand ups - where the meeting
takes place standing up so that no one gets too comfortable or goes on too
long.

Finally, I worked in one office that would put out Playdough and Legos for
meetings so that people would have things stimulating their hands while they
were listening and talking. This was fun.

------
kabes
In Randy Pausch's famous 'last lecture' he also speaks about organizing more
useful meetings. His trick that I found works best: organize a meeting half an
hour before lunch time and you'll be sure it won't last a minute longer than
planned. Nobody bullshits around while hungry.

~~~
p_l
The amount of missed lunches, late lunches, and lunches eaten in the meeting
suggests otherwise.

I think at best we had a break for lunch. At worst it was "just few more
minutes and then we'll be free for lunch"

------
auiya
In my company's version of OKRs, I count "number of meetings declined" among
my most shining and useful quarterly metrics.

------
lifeisstillgood
A code review is a "meeting" designed to produce innovative outcomes (i most
often find a better way when doing a code review than when planning the code
or when writing it. At least I notice what we missed)

But the remote nature of code reviews suggest that at least most "innovative"
style meetings do not need to be synchronous - or location specific

A very good thing :-)

------
Guthur
I'm reading no more articles that use feminine as the gender neutral pronoun
it's nonsensical politically motivated language control.

If one finds the traditional masculine gender neutral pronoun form
objectionable to there politically sensibilities then use something gender
free, pushing the other way is hypocritical stupidity.

~~~
CathedralBorrow
Wait, using masculine as a gender neutral pronoun is normal but you get
offended if anyone uses feminine as a gender neutral pronoun? That doesn't
sound very reasonable.

------
reacweb
IMHO the symptoms of a good meeting are: \- the organizer speaks less than
half the time \- some points are discussed and added in the meeting minutes
that were omitted in the agenda \- some chaos occurs and the agenda is not
fully respected (or the order is not respected).

------
henryshapiro
I've read this article about 4 times in the last few hours, and there's so
much to say about it -- partly because it resonates pretty deeply with the
product I'm currently building (reclaimai.com, apologies for the shameless
plug) but also because I think it flies in the face of some logic that has
emerged over the past several years. Namely, that meetings are anathema to
productive organizations and that individualized "focus time" is the only way
to achieve meaningful outcomes (see:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)).

The quote that sticks out to me the most:

> Some people will assert that meetings are creativity killers, and “a camel
> is a horse designed by committee”. But this is absurd. We’ve all been in
> conversations where one idea sparks another. And while an individual can
> write a novel or paint a portrait, solo creativity is no way to produce
> nuclear fusion or a new antibiotic. In a world full of specialists, complex
> projects require collaboration. Meetings can and do generate ideas that no
> individual could have conceived alone. _They do not do so automatically,
> however._ (emphasis mine)

Managers, in particular, need to internalize this ideology: if you're
responsible for leading a broad group of highly-motivated-but-disparate
individuals, your fundamental role is collaboration, analysis, collation, and
decisionmaking. Not every instance of collaboration needs to take the form of
a meeting, but as the author indicates, "there are many situations in which
there’s simply no substitute for a meeting". In other words: managers actually
need meetings to push the organization's agenda forward. It's not about more
or fewer meetings, it's about more high-quality meetings that drive teams to
figure hard stuff out and make informed, efficient, and effective decisions.

This isn't to say that focus time is meaningless or not useful to managers,
but just that a manager's job is inherently less to individually make and more
to synthesize ideas from smart people. That tends to happen in interactive,
real-time forums.

One thing Tim doesn't touch on here is how meetings align to priorities, both
for the manager and for the company at large. Or: how does your calendar, the
declarative record of where you'll likely spend your time, the oft-hedonic
treadmill of your week, actually reflect what's important to you at a
strategic level? There's a super interesting article that Mike Monteiro wrote
in 2013 ([https://medium.com/@monteiro/the-chokehold-of-
calendars-f70b...](https://medium.com/@monteiro/the-chokehold-of-
calendars-f70bb9221b36)) that touches on this exact topic.

His basic thesis is that if all you do is block out time for "working" or
"focus time" on your calendar, that time is inherently more interruptible than
the meetings. This is anecdotally pretty spot-on for most people: how many
times have you been sent an invite for a meeting that overlaps with your
precious working time, with the inviter stating "Well, I saw that you just had
'Working' there, so I figured you were free"? That's the interruptibility of
focus time in action.

A better way, IMO, is to actually map all the time on your calendar to real
priorities. Don't just put "working" time down. State what you're planning to
do with that time as part of the actual calendar event, and make it known to
those who would interrupt it. This does two important things for your
schedule:

1) It makes you think about your time in a much more fundamentally useful and
meaningful way. You'll also probably find that a ton of events just don't map
to anything strategic for you or the organization.

2) It signals that that time serves a purpose, not just a catchall for reading
email or Slack.

If you're interested in this methodology, I wrote a post about it a few weeks
ago: [https://blog.reclaimai.com/posts/2019-07-11-how-to-fix-
your-...](https://blog.reclaimai.com/posts/2019-07-11-how-to-fix-your-work-
calendar-without-falling-apart-a-schedule-maker-for-focusing-on-what-matters/)

------
ltbarcly3
What we get wrong about meetings is scheduling meetings. If you are blocked
because you need information or you need to coordinate with someone, walk over
and talk to them. Yes, this will interrupt them, but guess what, a meeting
interrupts them _more_ , and it delays the unblocking of you. If it isn't
critical, don't interrupt them, wait until you see them free or it's lunchtime
or something, or send them an email that they can respond to when they are
able, or message them on one of the 8 messaging platforms you are probably
both logged into at any given time.

The point is that the idea that you need to have a calendar entry and a room
and time set aside to talk for a minute is ludicrous and not something that
you see anywhere else besides professionals who are charging for their time.

Just to counter obvious defenses of meetings:

\- if it's really worth it to take the time then scheduling it is a wasteful
delay. If it's not worth interrupting someone briefly then it's not worth
interrupting them later via some kind of calendaring system and designated
meeting place. That is just interrupting them with a lot of extra steps.

\- if your schedule is so booked that you need a calendar to keep all your
meetings straight then you had better be a doctor or a dentist or a car
mechanic or a salesman who deals with 'strangers' who are paying you, because
if you work in an office and are meeting with your workmates so much you need
to use a computer to keep it straight you are basically wasting time and desk
space and the office would be more productive if you just stopped being there.
You aren't doing anything productive and you are actively taking up at least
one productive person's time at any given time (this isn't strictly true, you
probably spend your time in meetings with people who also spend all their time
in meetings, so you are basically just passing gossip and playing politics all
day), so you are literally wasting two full salaries worth of company
resources and providing nothing.

\- it's not avoiding a disruption to schedule a meeting rather than just
tapping someone on the shoulder, when you have a meeting coming up you are
reminded by your phone and you are discouraged from digging into actual work
because you know there's a meeting in 20 minutes. Then you walk to the
conference room and the people using the room before you go over schedule by
10 minutes (or more, they probably started late from the previous people), so
you stand around and go get coffee and chit chat and wait for the meeting to
start instead of just hashing out whatever the subject is standing in the
hallway outside the room. Then you go in the room and half the time some
random person is invited and you have to dial into the conference system
because they stayed home that day, but you don't want them to hear you had a
meeting on subject X and didn't invite them, and finally everyone sits there
looking at their laptops and phones, respond to emails and message on slack
the entire meting, and they don't pay attention because it's a waste of time,
then some round number of minutes later you get kicked out of the room. What
would often be a 10 minute chat where the person was being completely
productive up to the instant you tapped them on the shoulder has turned into
an 1.5 hour long ordeal for 4 people.

\- if there is one person assigned to figure something out, they can go chat
with people 1-1 and gather information and learn about whatever the subject
is, discuss options, then make decisions. This is called 'doing work'. If
nobody is actually responsible then you get everyone who might know something
plus the the dummy that wants to be in every meeting because they don't know
what else to do all day and they all posture and try to show how smart they
are and try to introduce their pet projects and ideas regardless of how
irrelevant they are to the subject of the meeting. Then since nobody is
actually in charge you have to find some terrible consensus solution that
won't work and is pointless, so then nothing happens.

~~~
mattkrause
> a meeting interrupts them more

This depends _a lot_ on the question.

If we're meeting tomorrow to talk about X, I can prepare for that: look at
notes and code I've written, check some data, maybe even write some new stuff
for you. All of this can be done at a time of my choosing that doesn't
interfere with my other responsibilities.

If you just show up at my desk, expecting an immediate answer, several things
can happen. Maybe I know it off the top of my head; if so, I tell you quickly,
and you go away happy. More likely, however, is that I need a few minutes to
think about your question. I have to dig though my own code/notes/whatever,
look some things up, and think about them. This is weird to do with someone
watching; I think it often takes just as long, if not longer, and the end
result isn't as good.

Some of this can be avoided by saying "come back tomorrow morning" or "I'll
look into it and email you", but people often expect an answer right away,
especially if they've walked a bit to get to your desk.

