Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives.

Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and praised.

If you think of how much time you spend in meetings, some sort of meeting instruction/meeting consultant might just pay for itself in increased productivity.

I am not a meeting consultant or a manager, but using robert's rules of order in a hobby community made me much better at meetings.

Simple ideas like having the problem clearly stated, asking for proposed solutions, debating them by going back and forth from opposed to in support so that it's clear when the minority has all been heard from without having everyone have to put in 2 cents, only including actual stakeholders etc.

Anyway that's not to distract from this effort, this seems like a great solution to any scheduling problems if nobody is in an open office.

Of course video calls work best when everyone has private office space without an open plan.

Thanks for bringing this up! One thing that we are not yet sure how much value the concept of daily/weekly standing meetings will add to the teams using Meetter for most of their meetings.

I feel like many meeting habits and practices are evolved from the physical office environment that has limitations that are not present in the virtual world.

Btw, check out this talk from Al Pittampali at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn-q529ExFw One of the keystone habits he is advocating is "Make all standing meetings tentative"

Thanks for your suggestion on landing page!

The problem we see is that companies in their transition from physical office to a virtual and distributed workplace carried over all the meeting habits that are outdated.

We believe there is no longer need in standing meetings with fixed audiences.

With Meetter, you are basically setting your weekly meetings budget for the whole company and let topics compete for that time. This is a lot different from what is happening today: meetings fight for all the available time on everyone's calendar.

Meetter hours are not finalized until 15 minutes before the start. High priority, smaller and shorter topics win. Meetter makes all meetings about what they should be: about solving problems, not about socializing & sharing updates - there are less expensive ways to do that.

Can tool change the culture? We are optimists and believe they can.

That is true that meeting productivity highly depends on meeting organizers. That role starts with figuring out if the meeting is needed, finding a time, inviting people who own the decision, etc. Not that many people good at it.

But, what happens if we try to de-centralize the organizers? What if anybody can play a role of organizer of much smaller meetings (10 mins vs 60 mins)? What if there is a limit on how many meetings can be scheduled a day (1 hour vs 8 hours)? What if time reservations are not based on the first-in rule, but dynamic and based on the priority?

I have tried to do some of that with a Slack bot project I'm working on, called Huxley: https://www.meethuxley.com/

Basically, it used guided questions to get you to give structure to your meetings. I will add some of your suggestions, they sound very good.

I should also get around to releasing it one of these days...