71–80 of 111 posts
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 c…
> For OP, it's a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML This sounds pretty dysfunctional. Is that a productive meeting? I was involved in an "all leadership" type meeting that was heading in that direction, and then we switched to a memo based meeting. Everyone wrote their update in a Google Doc, each team had a section. The expectation was that you read the memo be…
But on a light day I have around 2-3 meetings a day. One of them usually being an interview with the candidate (either phone or onsite).
> For OP, it's a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML This sounds pretty dysfunctional. Is that a productive meeting? I was involved in an "all leadership" type meeting that was heading in that direction, and then we switched to a memo based meeting. Everyone wrote their update in a Google Doc, each team had a section. The expectation was that you read the memo be…
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 c…
Many companies criminally underhire talented technical PMs and team assistants. The latter in particular are fantastic and you’d be amazed just how much can be handed off to them. You can completely transform how much time you have for people by investing more in these areas. The phrase “executive assistant” is just one huge mistake. It makes the role sound like a secretary to one person, which makes people think the…
> For OP, it's a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML This sounds pretty dysfunctional. Is that a productive meeting? I was involved in an "all leadership" type meeting that was heading in that direction, and then we switched to a memo based meeting. Everyone wrote their update in a Google Doc, each team had a section. The expectation was that you read the memo be…
That sounds even more dysfunctional. Sure, you save meeting time, but why not just go one step further and put a discussion thread on each topic, and skip the meeting entirely. Because if it works as you describe, people are voluntarily siloing themselves off by skipping other meeting blocks, and you lose the one benefit such meetings have, which is to make sure the entire leadership team knows what is going on and c…
If you don’t have an opinion then you find out what happened with the follow up email/memo.
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 c…
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.
Around here, everyone complains about meetings, yet few do anything about it.
Its just easier to go to meetings, instead of thinking hard to reduce others’ time with google docs, async discussion, etc.
And those who creatively push back against meetings fear being called “hard to work with”