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Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

philipotoole.com

41–50 of 235 posts

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#41

I'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.

Glad to know I'm not alone

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#43
post #32
post #17

I'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"

We meet in person and have a culture where closing your laptop is followed pretty well.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#45

> 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…

Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed…

On the exact opposite side, I remember when I first started working and was used to keeping an eye on the clock because of, oh, 16 years of school that had us timed to the minute. I'd walk into meeting rooms right when it was supposed to start and interrupt whoever was in the previous meeting and was going over. Surprised a lot of people like that.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#46
post #35
post #28

This 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. ;)

This is exactly the problem. I don't know if any other sector of business runs on as much as fad as ours does.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#47
post #38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#49
post #18

There'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.

Any meeting without an agenda is a waste of time.
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