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Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

philipotoole.com

141–150 of 235 posts

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#141
In my experience, the recipe for having meetings interface smoothly with the time that surrounds them is twofold:

1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.

2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.

That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.

You start on time, you end on time.

The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.

But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)

Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.

This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.

Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.

I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#142
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That almost sounds insulting. Like management is the only party with vision, drive and a goal and everybody else is just there to help. When often management just manages and true innovation really comes from people of all positions.

On the contrary, it is a helpful term. Before the term, it was common to ask "are you a manager", and then you were defined oppositionally, as not-a-manager. Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.

[deleted]

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#145
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. It's a relatively common term. I wouldn't read too much into it. I'd rather not have by ass kissed with a term like "everyday innovator". -- "Individual Contributor" is fine.

I like it - though we use SME- Subject Matter Expert. E.g. If you aren't an SME or a Manager, then why are you in the meeting? (SME encompasses PM and BA roles, as they too should be experts in their domain and ideally on the domain we are working on.)

SME and IC are functionally different. SME informs, IC creates. Often, IC aren't SME in the space they're developing in, because they're SME of the technology instead of the business.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#146

Doesn't anyone have to hit the can between meetings? Or are we all using catheters now?

My video is off for a reason!

and wireless headset - i've done everything from cooking lunch, answering the door, toilet, walking around the house, laying in bed. When you aren't required to be watching someones screen, there is a lot of freedom. This doesn't work well if you don't have a microphone though. though you could just join from your phone.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#148
post #6

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.

Isn’t the point of TFA that meetings _unavoidably_ run 5 minutes late, and so starting at 0:05 will avoid being impacted by the previous meeting? I see two flaws: 1) This only works as long as nobody else does it. If the meeting prior to yours follows the same strategy then you’re in the same position as today 2) it starts 5 minutes later but has no plan for ending 5 minutes earlier, which means the next meeting will…

To me ending at 0:55 is a million times more logical than starting at 0:05… and if there was an issue then rolling back to 0:50, or 0:45, or whatever it takes for honest accounting and/or meeting discipline to emerge.

Decades ago at an engineering firm I worked for it was baked into the groupware settings.

The smelly basement nerd running IT seemed normal back then, but here are in 2026… Turns out he was an unsung smelly genius ahead of his time. A giant among men who bathe.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#149
I want Teams to show me the dollar cost of meetings. Enter an approximation of the average salary for people involved in the meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting, and broadcast the cost ticking up every second to every person in the meeting.

I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.

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