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Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

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Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#11

Post by georgeecollins »

letientai299 wrote: post #9

2h 3 for interview and report, then 2h ~4 for other kind of meetings (sync, feature discussion, 1-1), then some mentoring sessions, 30m * 3-5. ~16h meeting every weeks. To be honest, I'm very much dislike that, but people seems to love talking more than writing detailed docs.

There is also the issue that some people don't read things. Plus, when people don't read something there isn't very good feedback that they aren't paying attention. If you have a meeting, you know that the information you wanted to get across is being transmitted and you have a way to quickly detect if people aren't paying attention or they don't understand.

People do like talking and lots of meetings are unnecessary. But I think you can deal with the issue better if you get into the heads of the people calling the meetings and figure out alternatives that meet their needs as well.

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#12

Post by nirvanis »

I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).

I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.

I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.

My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:

X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) / (5 weekdays) )

In my case (40-18)/5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#13

Post by mason55 »

nirvanis wrote: post #12

I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc). I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fr…

One thing I did to combat this was refuse to allow any recurring meetings on Fridays. I almost always end up with a couple of one-offs but I can usually put those at the start of the day. Typically this results in 6+ hours of uninterrupted time on Friday.

The rest of my week is a fragmented disaster but at least Fridays are nice.

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#15

Post by falcolas »

Enterprise Architect: 11 mandatory hours this week, and a number of regular meetings have been canceled. Optional meetings amount to around 7 hours this week; pretty light.

At my busiest, it is closer to 30 hours a week, and my longest regular meeting is a quarterly planning offsite that's ~3x 8 hour days.

EDIT: I can't say that I resent any of these, since they're simply a part of the job. My role has a component that I have come to call 'state synchronization'. I act as a bridge between multiple groups by syncing up technical knowledge, status, and blockers between the various engineering groups (and other technical leadership) who I work with.

Standups work great for small groups, but they don't scale well beyond 10-15 people.

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#17

Post by vosper »

It makes sense to also post your role if you're posting your meeting hours here.

Because if you're a VP or senior director then yeah, your life is probably meetings and that's normal. If you're an engineering team lead spending 16 hours a week in meetings, well maybe not so much.

Without that info your post doesn't really tell us much, other than some people have more meetings than others :)

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#20

Post by tyfon »

I'm not a direct manager for IT but I am involved in a lot of projects at our IT department. I used to be pestered into useless meetings all the time but now I just reject them and email people over issues that should really only take 5 minutes to cover.

Now I am down to one fixed meeting a week and I sometimes accept a couple more if the topic actually needs several people in the room to discuss.

I hate meetings!

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