11–20 of 235 posts
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour. I've never seen this pressure. > meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change. It's like I live in an entirely different world. Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just s…
We do this at my work and guess what - meetings tend to run 5 minutes late because everyone knows the next meeting doesn’t start until 5 past.
Yeah, this works because it's novel. If it became the norm, people would adjust to it and we'd right back where we started.
We do this at my work and guess what - meetings tend to run 5 minutes late because everyone knows the next meeting doesn’t start until 5 past.
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour. I've never seen this pressure. > meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change. It's like I live in an entirely different world. Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just s…
My bosses (leadership) are in meetings literally all day long. Them showing up 5 minutes late to an internal meeting has nothing to do with them "learning". It's entirely about priorities. Teaching them to "show up on time" does nothing and only hurts me for being obtuse with them.
At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.
Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.
It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
I'd recommend taking this even further. Start every meeting 30 minutes after the hour, and end it 30 minutes before the hour.
Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.
If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.