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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?

#51

Post by jakebellacera »

samatman wrote: post #50
daseiner1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am both the driver of my team moving to 15-minute stand ups, and the dude “secretly” pulling the occasional heroic all nighters. peak cognitive dissonance rn

hah. Do you actually get standups resolved in under 15 minutes more than half the time? If so, what's your secret?

We do, in a team of 10. We have a very strict rule of being prepared before standup and going through the standup list quickly (I think for us at least, just having the team all aligned on wanting to finish the meeting as fast as possible helps keep it running quickly and smoothly.

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

#52

Post by wintorez »

Unnecessary meetings are the bane of my existence. I want to suggest a hack to shorten meetings, and eliminate unnecessary ones: remove all chairs from meeting rooms. All meetings have to be done while standing up. No sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall.

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

#53

Post by jakebellacera »

I have bi-weekly 30 minute 1:1s with my chapter lead and manager. I also have a 30 minute sync every week on each of my project(s) I'm leading and daily standups with my squad.

All in all, I'm probably spending anywhere from 2-5 hours per week on meetings, on average.

Our organization is pretty distributed across a variety of timezones, so the expectation of having face-to-face meetings is not always feasible. That means project spec reviews and other planning-related discussions are typically performed asynchronously over Confluence and Slack.

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

#54

Post by kfarr »

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…

Thank you for posting this. I am also in a situation where I am a mid level manager for a globally distributed team. The advice of "just have less meetings" or "force an agenda for all of them" has already been followed -- you really do have to talk a lot of people in certain roles.

I love the idea of a regular "defrag" process. I haven't done this consciously but it's happened that way because I'm in Pacific time zone and we have a EU headquarters, so as a result there is a chunk between 7am-11am Pacific that is almost always booked. Leaves the rest of the day for working time. Not perfect but works for me.

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

#55

Post by kevstev »

MiracleUser wrote: post #45
forkexec wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another technique is to insist on an agenda before any meeting, both for time to prepare and to see if it's pertinent, or the default answer is "no." Standing meetings are 99% a waste of time, usually about someone/s trying to climb the career stripper pole.

Standing meetings are also used to force procrastinators to report in frequently enough that they stop relying on "secret" all-nighters at the end of the week to get their work done

I believe you may be confusing "stand up" from scrum/agile with a "standing" meeting meaning a meeting with a weekly or some other recurring cadence.

A stand up done right is IMHO not a problem and effective. Various other status and weekly meetings generally just waste time.

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

#56

Post by kevstev »

At a place I considered very dysfunctional I once had a record of 8.5 hours of meetings scheduled for the day. I went to my manager and said "we have way too many meetings" and he replied back "if you don't like meetings maybe you don't want to be a manager..."

Where I am now (generally quite functional IMHO)- I have a few monthly meetings that are an hour in length.

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

#57

Post by piptastic »

Architect. - currently no regularly scheduled meetings.

Sometimes I'll have a recurring meeting for a particular project, but even those end up being useless as we talk about the project all the time outside of the meetings, and we end up cancelling half of the recurring ones.

On average I'll have around 3 hours of non-recurring meetings per week (although some weeks have none).

That said, there's probably ~2 hours a day of impromptu conversing with colleagues on work topics that eats up a lot of time.

The rest of the company has the normal "waste half of the week" set of agile meetings that they attend.

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

#58

Post by Jemaclus »

I'm a director at my company. I spend all day, every day in meetings, with the exception of Friday afternoons. I typically spend that time just thinking about everything that happened in the week and writing down thoughts and things to deal with for the next week. I'd say 75% of those are pre-planned a week or more in advance, and the rest just pop up as people want to talk to me. I often just have to reply "If you can find time in my schedule, do so and we'll talk."

I don't have time to code these days. I don't really miss it that much, but it's nice when I do get a chance to write something.

About 1/4 of them are 1:1s, another 1/4 are leadership meetings similar reactions. I'd say another 1/4 are project planning, kickoffs, and checkins. The last 1/4 are just ad-hoc one-off meetings, often to deal with an emergency or personnel issue.

I don't mind it, generally. I actually like the face-to-face interactions with people and enjoy most of the meetings. The problem I have with it is the whole "meeting that could have been an email" thing. Especially status update meetings. Huge waste of time.

The other problem is that I do have a number of direct reports and I'm doing them a disservice by not having time to interact with them more directly. I'm in the process of hiring some more managers to take that load off my back.

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

#60

Post by hderms »

pgm8705 wrote: post #8

One 90 minute leadership meeting a week. Generally, that will be it, unless there is another issue that requires hashing something out. For my engineering team, I try to keep "meetings" at 0. Well organized asynchronous communication with the occasional slack discussion keeps things running pretty smoothly.

How large of a team is it? How do you estimate the complexity of work?
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