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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. I have a product (unreleased, still in private beta) that's in the privacy space. I want people to know I care about their privacy, and that absolutely no information is given to third-parties.
What's the best way I can get GDPR compliant? I know that GDPR isn't designed to crack down on products like mine, but I'm still legally required to comply. A simple notice saying user data isn't given to any third parties? I have a privacy policy, of course.
Apart from a privacy policy I do not believe any notice is necessary. The "notices" you see on pages today are actually asking for consent to store data, but you don't need to do that if you aren't storing data. (IANAL)
As for bragging about your privacy stance - well - that's a product design decision. Personally I'd probably do it on the "why you should use this" style pages and leave it out of any functional pages.
Do you have a team working full time on the security of your service? Taking privacy seriously is necessary, but not sufficient for protecting that most sensitive data.
Yes, security and privacy are the utmost concern for both of us. I want to stress we do not store any personal data, it only hits memory while we tabulate the results, and then we remove the token so we can't access it again. The only thing we store is your email to tie it to that tabulation.
When you say you "remove" the token, does it continue to be valid? If the token accidentally leaks (logs?), or if someone willfully intercepts it, will they have access to the calendar?
Depends on the service. Google allows us to invalidate the token when we're done, rendering it useless, so we do. You'll notice that if you run the stats tool again you'll have to re-authorize it for Google.
Microsoft does not, so it will remain valid. We don't store it or log it anywhere, and the system that retrieves and processes data is not publicly accessible.
I know you have good intentions here, but I hope you are aware that you may unintentionally be storing it somewhere [1]. Not much you can do about it unless you keep actively searching for it everywhere.
[1] I strongly remember reading an article here on HN recently about some security breach stemming from writing production secrets in log files, but I can't find the link :/ If anyone else has it, can you post it?
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...) 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.)
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.
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.
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?".
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
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.
I find that having even one meeting pretty much ruins my whole day. Before the meeting, I find it hard to get into a real flow state because I know the meeting is coming up and I'll have to stop. After the meeting, I feel like the day has already been destroyed so I typically spend the rest of the day surfing and reading HN.
Meetings first thing in the morning or at the end of the day are better in that regard.
When done right meetings preserve the flow state. I think of meetings as scheduled communication, and if communication isn't blocked into a schedule then it will either happen ad hoc, or not happen at all. Ad hoc communication results in interruptions, and communication is necessary to have a shared context.
However this experience could be due to me working working on a distributed team. When you're all in the location then it's easier to have ad hoc communication without interruption at places like the water cooler.
I love that idea! We are talking to a lot of people in Product roles to do just that. Basically blocking times or days out with no interruptions, as well as giving them the insight to protect their teams so they can work.
That sounds interesting - got me thinking a little more about this.
I wonder if simply by making the information available on when people are in flow state, a lot of flow state interruptions could be reduced, even without reducing the number of meetings. In particular, encouraging scheduling a meeting at the beginning / end of a flow state period rather than slap bang in the middle would have a big impact. For example, assume you want to work in flow from 10:00-12:30, scheduling a 15 minute meeting at 10:00 or 12:15 is preferable to scheduling one at 11:00, because you might still be able to get into flow for a couple of hours.
I'd like to see a scheduling system which dynamically encourages people to assign other meetings to an already compromised flow period to keep other flow periods free (rather than just blocking things out).
My worry is that without this, just focussing on minimal number of meetings / cost spent in meetings might not be enough. 3 badly scheduled 30 minute meetings might write off a whole day, whereas a single meeting of 1hr30 might have a much smaller impact, but on the raw "time spent in meetings" / "salary cost spent" metric these would seem equivalent.
How would you do this? Firstly, flow isn't really something you plan, it's more like, you get working on something and oh my god, it's 5:30 already? Where'd the day go?
Second, you can't just move meetings around, in my experience. Once something is scheduled, it calcifies; it's too much work coordinating time zones and schedules, and if you push something up, most people that were planning on it being later will be even more unprepared to discuss than usual.
This is a good point. I agree that having a 2 hour slot doesn't guarantee that I will get into a flow state, but it is a prerequisite for me to have a couple of hours at least to do this type of work.
I think the idea of being able to loosely schedule certain meetings (eg "Give me the least worst 30 minutes for the 3 people this week") could be an interesting thing to try. Having a system which knows whether it is advisable to 'bring forward' or 'push back' a meeting could be a big help. I also think that if a meeting is continually pushed back or brought forward, this might be interesting information in and of itself, especially for recurring meetings.
There could be downsides to this and I find it hard to even imagine what such a system would be like, given my current experience with Google Calendar, where even scheduling a meeting or room seems to be about 5 minute process.
How do you reconcíliate future meetings with future flow states? Unless you have the ability to pospone a meeting when you are flowing I don’t see how to do this, unless you’re able to build a pattern over time and use that information to preemptively inform the organizer of best suited times to schedule a meeting
I hadn't really thought this through, but the ability to 'snooze' a meeting sounds like something which could be really useful, especially when I'm on maker's schedule and I'm meeting someone on manager's schedule (terminology from here http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html).
In fact, on a previous job, this happened a couple of times. I was in flow, finishing something off or pairing and I would forget about my 1-1, showing up 15/30 mins late. I was always really embarrassed, but actually it didn't affect the manager too badly because they had other things to be getting on with.
My manager wanted a scheduler which satisfied the condition 'I would like to see all of my team members for at least 30 mins each on Wednesday', but they didn't mind who was seen when. In practice, these appointments were scheduled, by the manager, pretty much randomly I think, and fixed in advance, but something fluid could have worked.
Perhaps it is inevitable that all makers want meetings at the beginning / end of the day, but I'm not sure, especially when there are other meetings etc going on. Also, perhaps the short term rearrangement would be so disruptive or unsettling that it wouldn't be practical. My experience in some jobs has been that this was happening anyway with people frequently late to meetings, so they were defacto snoozed anyway.
As you say, if nothing else, such a system might surface some interesting data on which meetings were always missed / moved.
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.
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.
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.
Very cool Paul :). One thing we have played with on the business version is to send people who make meetings with more than 5 attendees an email to let them know how much that meeting is going to cost the company and to review who they invite. With the hope that makes them go "oh shit", maybe I don't need 16 people on this check-in.
Ouch :), we did work to comply with GDPR and we are. We do not share any of your data with anyone else and never will. I am not sure why they are reporting we are sharing with a 3rd party as we are not, and I have a support ticket open with the popup service to find out why. We will move tomorrow morning to a new one if we can't get that resolved. I am sorry for the trouble there :(.
Harsh, yes, but as a user I have zero trust in a service that can't respect GDPR.
And honestly, there is no reason to trust a service that uses dark patterns regarding tracking and personal data. If I were you I'd sort this out quickly and also re-evaluate why you are using a service that employs these dark patterns.
While the creator replied saying they are compliant. There are a lot of services that quite frankly don't need to give a shit about GDPR. It's simply not relevant to every business.
Why? If I am not doing business in the EU and not based there. I really don't care if someone from the EU visits my site and I am not complient. Basically most of the planet falls into that category.
GDPR isn't setting some completely unrealistic standard, it is just the absolute bare minimum that you could possibly expect. If you don't want to uphold that and actively try to exploit your users for pennies, sure, go ahead. But most of the world would rather you stay offline.
I'm not saying I abuse or collect/sell info, I'm just pointing out that the GDPR is generally irrelevant to most sites. Most sites don't need to follow it to the T. But agreed they should have common decency.
Furthermore, there are a ton of users that don't know what the GDPR is and wouldn't give a shit if they did; they are just sick of clicking out of a spammy cookie popup on every website they go to.
I dunno, we're six months into this now, and all I see as a result is a lot of fussing, a lot more cookie popups, and a meaningless sidechannel on comments for every side project or US local newspaper article posted here about how they haven't bothered with GDPR compliance and are somehow evil for using google analytics cookies without telling people.
Yep, it's awesome. Hopefully that will continue until sites adapt or die. You get an instant indication that you can't trust a site with anything of value.
Also the changes in the industry are huge. Just because some sites have a hard time grasping the idea that the user isn't the enemy doesn't retract from the massive success that it is despite it being so new.
Just one example is the many places where you suddenly are able to downloading your data as well as delete it.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
yep totally, we are not sure if anyone wants those too as they are pretty severe. The other option is we just feed that back into analytics so you can see how much it is happening and it does the software based coaching.
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 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
