some teams at my org start 5 mins past some don't... result, some people hop on early and keep waiting and some meetings ppl don't show up for at least 5 mins.
Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
71–80 of 235 posts
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#72I prefer not having back-to-back meetings.
When I have 5 hours of meetings in a given day, I'd much rather have them back-to-back, rather than with a half-hour or hour in between. I try to pack all my meetings for the week into a couple of days, so that I have the rest of the week to do non-meeting work.
I'd rather scatter them uniformly across the entire week, so in the time between meetings I can slack off, I mean, prepare for the next meeting.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#73It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#74This 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. ;)
Absolutely. Insightful LinkedIn posts from thought leaders who complete every sentence or utterance of a thought with two line breaks...
Like this.
Aren't going to write themselves, are they? :D
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#75During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.
Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.
I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:
1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late. 2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. 3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.
The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#76Creative idea, however most calendar software clients offer meeting start times rounded to increments of 15 min.
Setting meetings to start at :05 or :20 or :35 or :50 adds friction.
Defaults matter for habit formation.
There is your golden opportunity to point out internal Gemini to the Calendar codebase and make it become reality.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#77During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour. Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db. I was serendipitously th…
I’ve experienced this all before in similar ways. The metric for meetings ending on time isn’t even very useful because when it’s needed people will ask “do you have a hard stop?” or similarly agree to continue the meeting. Often because of all the points you made, it’s the IC that stick around to talk about finer points or specifics of what was decided or discussed. It’s best to do this while it’s fresh and between people that can “talk shop” at a granular level (whatever that means for your org/team). It’s actually a good thing your ICs want to collaborate or align separate from management. If you’re a manager and you could technically continue on the meeting, consider opting out to give them space as peers. I often ask “do you all need me to stay one?” and most often it’s a No. It all means that it’s basically 2 meetings occurring and it’s the scheduling calendar artifact that is faulty.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#78It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.
Can this be solved by a random clock? A clock which never tells you the real time - it adds randomly 1-10 mins every morning
My question is if people can't adapt to it, would it be a helpful technique?
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#79I'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.
This is borderline anti-social and a bit past introvert haha
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#80MIT does this. Every class starts 5 mins past, and also ends 5 mins early.
We did this at Google too while I was there (only the started 5-mins past part). It works really well.
No need to change the Calendar events though. It's just implicit that we'll start 5-mins past. (Or, well, explicit in MIT's case).