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Got fed up with 36 hours of weekly meetings. Built something to fix it
19 points by ashfernandez 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments
In my ops role at a major tech company, I peaked at a week-crushing *36-hours of weekly meetings* on a 40-hour work week, causing me to work evenings and weekends just to keep up with emails and core 'heads down' work.

A buddy of mine had the same issue and wanted to try to do something about it. We did months of research on meetings, which was actually pretty interesting and revealing. Both of us having analytical backgrounds, traced the issue back to a main root cause: unprepared meetings. Call it breaking it down to its first principles. We also realized that many meeting softwares were actually focusing on the wrong problem.

Some interesting stats we found: 65% of meeting owners never prepare. Also, only ~30% of meeting attendees found the meetings they attended impactful, despite ~80% of owners thinking otherwise. A clear gap.

The core issues we identified were:

- Lack of agendas, talking points, and objectives - Excessive participants, often unnecessary - Absence of structure and clear outcomes - No feedback to meeting owners

We tested this finding out ourselves in our meetings by:

- Establishing a single defined objective (i.e. what we want to leave the meeting with hitting) - Articulating thoughtful talking points well ahead of time - Limiting attendees to those with assigned talking points (max 3-4 people per meeting) - Asking for honest meeting feedback from our attendees - Politely declining unnecessary meetings, including 1:1s

The result after only 1-2 weeks: A remarkable 10-hour reduction in weekly meeting load, giving me back an entire workday and eliminating the need for evening and weekend work.

It was pretty wild how well this worked, but the key to keeping it this way was consistency.

We asked our colleagues and friends if they had similar issues with meetings and were astonished how common this was. SOO.. we developed an in-calendar tool that makes meeting preparation as simple as practicably possible. This tool streamlines the creation of crisp, structured agendas with impactful talking points, ensures only necessary people are invited, and makes it easy for attendees to provide feedback to meeting owners --- all of this in less than 2 mins.

**Check it out in action here: https://www.loom.com/share/d241273abef4418597ba3af3ab46e323

To the Hacker News community: Do you also struggle with heavy loads of unproductive meetings? Do you find meeting preparation is the best way to improve bad meetings? What else do you do to help yourself and others with improving unproductive meetings? We're trying to prioritize what features we should build next. We have many ideas, but want some collective input.

Suggestions welcome!




Having horrible time management in a company eat your work time and forcing you to work overtime seems like such an american thing, and something I have not heard of in Europe (probably because it would be illegal). And firing me for not doing overtime would also be illegal.

So if a company only left me with 4 hours per week because of meetings, then whose fault is that? Certainly not mine.


I'll be the cynical, grizzled old vet today and be the one to tell you that I've never seen a technical solution to an organization/social problem ever solve anything; it's a common misconception of young engineers (of which I was one some time ago).

I will also add that I was surprised when I got to be an adult how few people "do their homework" so to speak - the problem you have identified here. It's funny, as a kid, I mostly didn't do my actual homework because it was mostly pointless teacher-pleasing if you understood the concepts well enough, but now that I've grown up (at least a little bit), I actually want to be prepared.

At my current job, they actually printed out my resume and referred to it when they interviewed me; a practice that I picked up myself years ago, but have rarely seen others do. Just one example, but it showed a culture that actually believes in preparation which has carried through into other examples. Also, we don't have that many meetings lol.


I once worked for a director that required from all his managers and other people to use a standard word doc for meetings.

Before the start of the meeting, the agenda part needed to be filled in. At the end, a table with actions, including who ... does what ... withvdeadline .... needed to be filled in.

If you were new or he suspected something, or just randomly, he'd enter your meeting and ask the doc. Or mail someone after the meeting and ask for the actions/decisions. Or at a deadline, he'd ask how an action worked out. As long as you could answer something reasonable, all was well.

It worked well, and I learned a lot from him.


That's awesome. Wish more managers / directors did that and were that dedicated to improving meeting culture.


This is similar to Bezos standard for meetings. The person who plan for a meeting has to prepare a 6 pages memo (full text prose). The first 15-30 minutes of the meetings are to allow everyone to read the memo. If you can't articulate your point in details, you are not ready to host your meeting.


I've heard how great this works for Amazon. But I've worked at two other companies who tried to implement it and it was an utter failure both times. If your meetings are not going well, adding more bureaucracy and time to force them to work well is not a solution that will work for all organizations.


I read an article about this a few years ago and tried it this way and send the memo out beforehand.

It failed because key stakeholders just wouldn’t read the memo and I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work. Sadly, there was no autocratic power forcing the process.

So it ended very frustratingly with people asking questions in the memo and asking for a summary presented to them.

The memos were really helpful for product design so I still use the technique but just as a design reference for building.


I'm confused. If you were trying to recreate the method you'd read about, then I'm not sure you can say it failed when you left out the crucial element - dedicating time to reading the document together during the meeting.

The whole point of the method is to address the premise that you cannot rely on people to read documents in advance.


Why don’t they read the memo before the meeting?


I think the reason I remember is because Bezos has meetings all day and doesn’t have time to read all the memos beforehand.

Don’t think like an engineer with a few meetings and lots of prep time. Think like super busy people who have no prep time available. Or at least that your meeting isn’t a high enough priority to warrant them prepping.


As an attorney, I think your second point is the most salient: the participants in a meeting at Amazon care even less than my clients would care about their smallest legal problem.

If you wait until the beginning of the meeting to prepare, there is an extremely high risk that someone else in the room is prepared to eat your lunch. Don’t surrender the initiative by being lazy.

Fwiw I bet Bezos pre-reads plenty of memos and I doubt very much that his is lazy. The point stands.


You can’t guarantee everyone will read it, or dedicate the appropriate time and attention to it


Why on earth were you working evenings and weekends to make up for others' demands on your time? That is totally wild to me.


Presumably their role is not to sit in meetings all week and there are actual expectations of delivery. If you just shrug your shoulders and tell your manager nothing got done again because too many people booked meetings with you - don't expect to last long there. Your time management is on you. Working overtime is one way of dealing with this, a bandaid, but a common one. What op is trying is a way better approach and I think deserves props. Others' demands on your time only get worse the more senior you are.


> Presumably their role is not to sit in meetings all week

It is if they’re being entirely booked with meetings.

If I were OP, I’d absolutely bring this up to my manager, but I wouldn’t simply just acquiesce and work nights/weekends just to keep up. Time management is only on me if I’m given a chance to complete my tasks in the allotted time —- if I’m not given the time, that’s the company’s fault, not mine.


If their role is not to sit in meetings all week then maybe they should decline the invitations.


I work with this one guy. In his cube, he has a coffee mug that says, "I survived another meeting that should have been an email."

Have people prepare, sure. Cut down on un-necessary people, sure. Focus the meeting on one thing, which leads to shorter meetings, sure. But best of all, don't have the meeting if you can help it. Only have a meeting for what you can't do by email (or can't do without major inefficiency).


I'd get in trouble with that mug. I'd take it with me to meetings, my hand concealing the label, and then if I realize the meeting is useless, change hands and display the label towards the table.


LOL


How about some "This meeting is bullshit" socks?

https://i.redd.it/so93iqdrqv311.jpg


And if the meeting reaches a certain point, you put your feet on the table...


hahaha .. good swag for us to consider :)


A dear friend of mine that works at a very large tech company has frequent (many times a week) meetings at ungodly hours (such as 7am AND 11pm) because of time zone differences with other teams in different parts of the world. My friend says that he's not surprised in today's global framework, especially with large enterprises and claims that looking for another, less-intense job would be futile because it is probably like that everywhere, especially with large tech companies. I claim that he's gotten used to this abuse that it is not as widespread as he thinks.

I think some of these meetings might be important enough to warrant having one occasionally, but not as an almost-daily phenomenon.

Any similar experiences? I'm not in the software dev/engineering world so I'm not as well informed in the matter; however I'd be very surprised if a majority of people would accept such working conditions that are very adverse to a healthy work-life balance.


I had the same. It was almost like an obligation to join and show face. But I think what needs to happen is for it to be ok to drop early, or only show up for you piece and leave if you think the rest of the meeting is not applicable to you. This is particularly true for meetings with many cross-functional groups.


An alternative is to start declining meetings. Having so many meetings is not healthy neither sustainable. You can bring the topic to your manager and if your attendance is required in all meetings(highly unlikely) then the deadlines should accommodate for that.


Our company recently mandated everyone nuke their calendars of all recurring internal meetings to kick off 2024. Then, only add back the ones that provide value. It was a good exercise that definitely helped clear up my calendar.


I feel like Shopify did the exact same thing in Jan 2023


I've started just dropping out of meetings if I haven't participated in any of it for the last 10 minutes. If there's nothing for me to say or influence (and I am an opinionated and loud person that loves interjecting :D), then the meeting should've been in written form instead.

I've noticed I've emboldened some of the quieter devs I work with as well to skip the bullshit meetings, and it's nice checking people's calendars and seeing a LOT more focus time and auto-decline timeslots than before.


I want to first state that I really appreciate the effort. One thing that I realized being an EM for a while and on a lot of simultaneous projects at <large famous tech company>, is that one of the major issues with meetings wasn't only aimlessness, or too many people sitting in it, but actually that there were some people (somehow most often the dumbest ones) that will go on tangents, or just take up all of the breathing room and waste everyone elses time.

To me, the problem is a mix of talent & culture. Our "people" team heard all of the feedback and always vowed to fix communications/meeting culture with presentations and notion guides, but nothing ever happened because the root cause is simply a combination of poor talent and bad leadership that doesn't uphold strong values around effective communication.

Tools like these are just slapping lipstick on a pig most of the time, because if your folks don't care, none of the ratings you've implemented or any of these "agenda items" are really going to do anything if people aren't actually abiding or care. It's like using Jira or whatever pjm software you have. It can be the most powerful thing, but your feature tickets are a direct function of how well someone writes them and cares about writing them.

The only time I've ever noticed a good meeting culture, is by having fewer people work at a bloated org, having more focused teams via a sane org structure, and less types of folks who operate on a premise that they're productive because they've attended X meetings and answered Y slack messages, and really serious leaders who can shut someone up and move on to something else and call a meeting early because it's truly over. If you don't have folks like these, no amount of gcal addons or plugins will fix this IMO.


Great summary of the problem and solution! My question would be how do you get from the bloated org with weak communication values to a focused team WITH top-notch communication values?

Do you think that starts with a few empowered individuals in the working ranks, top-down leadership, or is it impossible to pivot?


never seen it done at a large corp tbh. but maybe it's happened. i just haven't experienced it. my theory is that it would mean empowering the right leaders to make hard decisions and be more ruthless with everyone's time.


I found that the more focus you put into async communications, the fewer meetings you have.

Even so, I've seen people focus on running good meetings. And it does help quite a bit, so I wouldn't discourage your direction at all. But you should also maintain an awareness that the most efficient meeting is one where it is never needed in the first place.


Came here to comment the same.

Any tool should start by asking "Could this meeting be an email, Slack message, a poll or a shared document?". Maybe even go further and ask why, so at the end of the month people can check if the reasons given really made sense.


I like this starting question! Maybe, the first thing you're prompted when you go to schedule a new meeting is "can this be an email, ping, or doc?"


When I had this problem I did the following:

* Rejected any meeting without a note that was booked in without me knowing what it was

* Rejected any meeting without a note that double booked me

* Rejected lunch time meetings

* No showed reoccuring meetings where I thought I wouldn't be missed. Sent my apologies most of the time.

* Set up meetings for myself in my calendar to do specific work

I never heard any complaints either from people or to my manager. I think people set up meetings as the easiest path. Since they're looking for the easiest path they're not going to put up a fight if you push back.


Does you company frown upon missing meetings? Totally agree with the easiest path theory.


I'd imagine they would and my manager would advise me to attend if anyone complained. I did highlight my approach to my manager before doing it. I had so many meetings at one point I didn't have an option really.


Btw.. if anyone wants to try it you can check it out through our website:

meetrics.ai

OR try it directly from the Chrome Webstore on your Google Calendar:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/meetrics/nddolgdejk...


I guess, let me alter my question. What I gather from the comments is that a cultural shift is needed in order to really make a difference. Can a tool do that? Maybe, maybe not.

What do you all think is a starting point to facilitate that cultural shift? How do you start getting the right behaviors started in the easiest way possible?


In big companies, sometimes the only way to make this happen is by making the tool mandatory.


One thing that has helped me with meetings is adding focus time to my calendar. I block off 2 hours per day for focus time. You can schedule a meeting during my focus time, and I can decline the meeting.

I also decline meetings with no agenda and let the organizer know I declined due to the lack of agenda.


What does the organizer say when you say there's no agenda, so I'm not attending?


I think your ideas about meetings are valid but that your tool isn't necessary to implement them.


We all use tools that are not “necessary”, but are very useful. Most developer tools fall into this category.


I think this process can be implemented by requiring meeting points and objectives in the description.

Thinking about the tools I use, there's not currently one that can be avoided so easily. The biggest tools I use now are GitHub, IDE, Slack, and GSuite.


You don't really need that IDE; you can just use a text editor. But you use the IDE because it brings major productivity gains with it.

The broader point was that yes, meeting discipline can be achieved by just sticking to certain practices. But a tool systematizes these practices and make them easier to implement. This is the reason we use most tools, even though we know that it is technically possible to survive without them (even if it would be very difficult).


Try Meetrics - would love to see what you think about it.


Ooof. I can't even imagine the other cultural issues at a company that could allow this to continue. I'm also really glad I don't work with people that need to be told how to have a basically effective meeting...


Painted as "fast moving, high energy, high collaboration" I guess.


Sounds like Calendly on steroids: when do you release SaaS or open source repository?




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