Back to back meetings?! Why on earth would you do that?
Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
31–40 of 235 posts
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#32I'd recommend taking this even further. Start every meeting 30 minutes after the hour, and end it 30 minutes before the hour.
You don't understand. If I arrange everything into written words and send out an email with a link to the document, noone will read it.
Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#33> 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…
I find it interesting when people such as the writer of the linked post take their experience and think it can just be applied to everyone else, and it'll always be a positive outcome.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#34There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets. 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.
Some meetings are more important than others. So losing 5 minutes of a useless meeting is better than not going over 5 minutes for the important meeting. Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
Only host important meetings.
Cancel useless ones.
Start and end on time.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#35This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots. Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.
But how is anyone supposed cultivate their personal brand and write books and substack articles about this type of meeting “hack”. Party pooper.
;)
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#36I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).
We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#37I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.
I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(
I think it's likely a problem with me specifically - I said no to going to celebrations like christmas lunch etc. But at the same time our team doesn't interact with each other socially in any other way. I'm very new to the job, so it isn't that I pushed everyone away from me, there just wasn't any closeness in the first place. It doesn't really help that I don't much like the job either.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#38I'd recommend taking this even further. Start every meeting 30 minutes after the hour, and end it 30 minutes before the hour.
You don't understand. If I arrange everything into written words and send out an email with a link to the document, noone will read it. Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"
I mean you can't make people read an email but I feel like you would have a much higher success rate if the content was in the email itself. You're competing with the other work that people have to do and actually get graded on, why add a layer of indirection?
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#39Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#40I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.
I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(
But there are other times for that, why in a meeting? I chitchat during day 1-1 (virtual/irl) with my teammates, I don't, for etiquette, have to do it again when starting a meeting.