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Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

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Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#21

Post by shoo »

woah wrote: post #6
bwb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we are currently doing a ton of customer dev interviews for the paid version which is aimed at teams and/or the entire business. Part of what we are testing is spending 30 seconds at the end of each meeting to rate the meeting and using that to diagnose the specific dysfunction it had. We use that to learn about the specific dysfunctions inside teams, departments, and the entire organization. Then we fix that wi…

A lot of these are pretty drastic... not sure I'd want to commit to them without really talking it over with the team and getting all the stakeholders involved

maybe we should set up a first session within the team to outline the problem, then a second session to plan who is going to reach out and meet with the various stakeholders in other teams, then another session to aggregate feedback from that first round of consultations has completed.

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#22

Post by bwb »

dotBen wrote: post #16

Even with the promise that they'll delete the data after, it doesn't seem like a reasonable value exchange. I would assume that meta-data and derived data is still going to be preserved. This looks like it's lead-gen for a future service they are building.

We do not keep any meta-data or derived data, we literally tabulate the numbers you see on that screen and just store that and the email it is run with. Plus we kill off the token afterwards. So the only place personal data would be is the memory until it is cleared.

We did this for fun, as a proof of concept for a paid saas idea, and because it might be a good lead gen source down the road. Our hope is people can use this to show their boss the pain meeting madness is causing, and what is preventing them from making. :)

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#23

Post by remyp »

prepend wrote: post #15
remyp wrote: post #2

OP here, happy to answer your questions! Most importantly: We take privacy very seriously, none of your calendar data is stored, just tabulated, and as soon as we finish we remove the token so we can't access anything in the future. The ONLY thing we store is the tabulation and your email address (which is not made public) tied to that tabulation.

Can you add an ability for me to upload a calendar file that I scrub out everything I don’t want you to have temporary access to?

This is a really good idea we hadn't thought of yet, thank you! We'd even be able to use the exact same logic to do the calculations...

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#24

Post by bwb »

rob-d wrote: post #20

I like this a lot. A similar thing which I'm interested in tracking is the impact of meetings on flow state. I wonder if it would be helpful to have a more nuanced way for "makers" to protect their flow state time than having to block out their calendar for hours / days at a time. I envisage a system where a meeting booker is able to make the decision - "Is the meeting important enough to curtail or split this person…

I love that idea! We are talking to a lot of people in Product roles to do just that. Basically blocking times or days out with no interruptions, as well as giving them the insight to protect their teams so they can work.

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#25

Post by bwb »

anyfoo wrote: post #19
remyp wrote: post #2

OP here, happy to answer your questions! Most importantly: We take privacy very seriously, none of your calendar data is stored, just tabulated, and as soon as we finish we remove the token so we can't access anything in the future. The ONLY thing we store is the tabulation and your email address (which is not made public) tied to that tabulation.

Do you have a team working full time on the security of your service? Taking privacy seriously is necessary, but not sufficient for protecting that most sensitive data.

Yes, security and privacy are the utmost concern for both of us. I want to stress we do not store any personal data, it only hits memory while we tabulate the results, and then we remove the token so we can't access it again. The only thing we store is your email to tie it to that tabulation.

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#26

Post by bwb »

Paul_Dessert wrote: post #18
prepend wrote: post #13

This is cool, but no way am I granting access to a years worth of calendar. I like how they describe their usage and that they auto remove access. But even if I believe them, there are many errors that would expose hundreds of email, contact info, and docs. I wish they had a scrubber utility I run and can remove unnecessary data. They should not need pii for their stats.

I made a similar tool. It just uses user input data. It gives you a good snapshot of the cost of a meeting, but doesn't go as deep as OP's tool. https://www.resumebeacon.com/planning-to-plan.php

Very cool Paul :). One thing we have played with on the business version is to send people who make meetings with more than 5 attendees an email to let them know how much that meeting is going to cost the company and to review who they invite. With the hope that makes them go "oh shit", maybe I don't need 16 people on this check-in.

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#27

Post by anyfoo »

bwb wrote: post #25
anyfoo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a team working full time on the security of your service? Taking privacy seriously is necessary, but not sufficient for protecting that most sensitive data.

Yes, security and privacy are the utmost concern for both of us. I want to stress we do not store any personal data, it only hits memory while we tabulate the results, and then we remove the token so we can't access it again. The only thing we store is your email to tie it to that tabulation.

When you say you "remove" the token, does it continue to be valid? If the token accidentally leaks (logs?), or if someone willfully intercepts it, will they have access to the calendar?

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#28

Post by remyp »

anyfoo wrote: post #27
bwb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, security and privacy are the utmost concern for both of us. I want to stress we do not store any personal data, it only hits memory while we tabulate the results, and then we remove the token so we can't access it again. The only thing we store is your email to tie it to that tabulation.

When you say you "remove" the token, does it continue to be valid? If the token accidentally leaks (logs?), or if someone willfully intercepts it, will they have access to the calendar?

Depends on the service. Google allows us to invalidate the token when we're done, rendering it useless, so we do. You'll notice that if you run the stats tool again you'll have to re-authorize it for Google.

Microsoft does not, so it will remain valid. We don't store it or log it anywhere, and the system that retrieves and processes data is not publicly accessible.

Re: Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings

#29

Post by vvoyer »

Very well done, I always wanted to build a similar product. But all of those tools are always missing the most important feature from my POV: company wide statistics on meetings:

- % of meetings per employees in time (i.e. are we more and more spending time in meetings since we are growing)

- automatic employees group diagram/relations computation based on meetings invites

- who's never in meetings (who's being solo)

- who's always in meetings

- % meetings without a clear agenda

- % of recurring meetings ("bad") vs one-offs (ok)

- meeting duration statistics

- external vs internal attendees

- anything else?

All of those company wide metrics would be gold for any execs willing to understand why are we slowing down on delivery or just having a clear overview of the organisation and how they collaborate.

Even for sales organisation this could be beneficial for tracking performance and suggesting strategies.

If I want to know if I am spending too much time in meetings, I just have to look at my calendar and own gut feeling. But if I want to know it for the whole company, I have not easy data point.

This startup had some meeting analytics tooling: https://medium.com/startup-grind/startup-mortality-what-end-.... But they stopped (maybe they should have focused ONLY on that).

If anyone would be interested to build ^, ping me at wouaren@gmail.com

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