Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?

1. Are you having a meeting because somebody is looking for information?

Do not have a meeting. Write shit down. There is e-mail and Slack and MS Teams and Google Docs and Sharepoint and Confluence and a billion ways to write shit down that does not require a meeting. Always make an attempt to gather information before you have a meeting, because you might get to the meeting and find out you have go to find out information somewhere else anyway.

Document where people should write shit down and where to go find information. Force people to write shit down by making it a requirement to do something. Make the process of finding or writing shit painless, easy, useful, and transparent (no hidden folders, secret channels, locked down access, obscure systems, etc). This is more difficult than it sounds, but the benefits are huge.

2. Are you having a meeting to decide something?

Before the meeting, if you think you're going to run over the meeting time, make the meeting longer, or realize that your meeting's scope is too big, or that you haven't gathered the information needed to make the decision. Also write down what you're going to talk about / decide, who is required to attend (& why), what/where the supporting information is, what the potential decision choices are. During the meeting, write down feedback. At the end of the meeting, write up what was decided. End the meeting as soon as you achieve the meeting's objective. Reply to all the attendees with the meeting notes (or a link to the meeting notes). Write all this down on a page titled "Meeting Checklist".

Tell your coworkers to include the Meeting Checklist in the meeting request. Make an e-mail filter to send all meeting requests without the checklist to the trash. Ask your boss to back you up on this.

People will bitch and complain about this because they'd rather interrupt 20 people for an hour than do a bunch of annoying preparation. Tell them that they have 2 alternatives: 1) don't have a meeting and figure it out offline, or 2) if it's an emergency, they can schedule a meeting without the checklist, if they include "EMERGENCY" in the subject of the meeting.

3. Do people just need an outlet for social interaction?

"social hours" / "office hours" can be a good way for people to talk without a meeting. Schedule these at either the beginning or end of the day (or both). This way people don't have to chit-chat in meetings because they know they can do it another time.

4. Do you still have too many meetings?

Schedule meeting-free days. I suggest two per week, because people break these and schedule meetings anyway. Block off your calendar all day.

Fight zoom fatigue. Require all meetings end 5 minutes early for every 30 minutes. So, 25 minutes for a 30 min meeting, 50 minutes for an hour meeting. Start the clock at the beginning of the meeting, don't wait 5 minutes for people to join. (Mention this in the meeting invite)

Have your whole team agree to block off their lunch time. Meeting flex time is nice, but not when it prevents people from eating and resting. This can be on an individual basis or group basis, but everybody's calendar should have a 1 hour block sometime during the day.

Have your team decide on a maximum number of meeting hours per day. Once your calendar has hit the max, start rejecting meetings, or cancel less important meetings. If your whole day is meetings, you better be a manager with 30 direct reports or something.

Use an auto-transcription service. If presence is required, try to get a real time system going and flag keywords. That way you can alternate task your way to the important bits without dedicated mental bandwidth. The nice thing about this is you just need the system audio feed, muted, as the input which by definition works with all conferencing platforms.

I'd assume that other communication is done semi-formally, e.g. a slack group or call. Updates are asynchronous, someone does an update and the the whole group knows. Anything where you have to block out 2 hours of everyone's time should be approved.

We dealt with this in the zoom era by having some people present but not paying attention. They would join the meeting but then turn the sound off and do their own thing. If we needed their input on something, then we would ping them on slack and they would come in and provide their input. In GCal, marking people as "optionally" attending meant that they were free to not pay attention.

> 2. I join to make sure I do not miss the critical pieces of information that I need. That is often five minutes out of sixty minutes.

We made a rule that every meeting had to have an agenda list posted to slack before the meeting and a summary posted to slack after the meeting. The meeting convener was responsible for making sure this happened but could delegate this responsibility to someone else. Often, this was a good onboarding task for new members joining the team.