Start your meetings at 5 minutes past • Hacker News Board

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#161

Post by randallsquared » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

7bit wrote: post #98

JustinAiken wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual Contributors - not managmenet

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.

As @hnlmorg mentioned, the term is only typically used for people who are at a level where they could be managers, primarily supporting others, but are instead still contributing directly themselves. It's almost the opposite sense from your "insulting", in my experience.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#162

Post by skizm » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

> You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.

We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#163

Post by Fysi » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #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…

Microsoft do have a tool for that at the business level but of course it costs (Viva Insights).

Alternatively you can build your own with MS Graph Data Connect but also it costs.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#164

Post by whitexn--g28h » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

When the start/end doesn’t matter as much for my team as changing the default duration to 25/50 minutes. This way even if a meeting would start at the quarter hour you would always end up with a small gap between.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#165

Post by ChiMan » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly important when power dynamics might otherwise derail real discussion.

Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#166

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

ChiMan wrote: post #165

A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly…

Whether it's planned or not, that seems like a pretty normal dynamic. "Let's give people a few minutes and then we'll get started." Especially with back to back meetings which are the norm for a lot of people, they need a few minutes to grab coffee/water, use the bathroom, etc. (And, of course, with in person meetings they usually need some time to run to the next room.)

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#167

Post by ChiMan » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #166

ChiMan wrote: post #165

A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly…

Whether it's planned or not, that seems like a pretty normal dynamic. "Let's give people a few minutes and then we'll get started." Especially with back to back meetings which are the norm for a lot of people, they need a few minutes to grab coffee/water, use the bathroom, etc. (And, of course, with in person meetings they usually need some time to run to the next room.)

Yep. In general, when you see social solutions emerge in the wild from the free choices of participants, there is an underlying logic that’s doing important work. It’s easy to think you can improve over these natural solutions, but usually you can’t.

I recall working at this place that prided itself on starting meetings a minute early, as if trying to prove a point. The early starts did prove that, yes, you could get people to scramble, but not much else.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#168

Post by onion2k » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

steve1977 wrote: post #112

tanvach wrote: post #75

During 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…

In my experience, the best approach is simply to have as few meetings as possible.

People don't know what 'as few as possible' means though. It needs to be clearer than that. As a rule I encourage my reports to consider:

- Does it even need to be a meeting? Keeping meetings to things that need 'a discussion or decision', and keeping updates and announcements to chat or email works fairly well.

- Does the meeting give you any value, or do you bring value to it? If both are no they should decline it.

- Is there an agenda with expected outcomes? No agenda and no goal means it should be declined.

- Are you doing something that's a higher priority? Seeing one of my reports in a meeting when there's an active incident in progress gets me asking questions.

- Does the person running the meeting share notes afterwards? One thing I've noticed over the last couple of decades is that people are much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards. People don't skip them if being in the meeting is the only way to know about what was discussed or decided. I always encourage people to write some notes and share them if they've set up a meeting now.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#169

Post by zmj » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #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…

A friend of mine built something for this: https://howmuch.poiesic.com/

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#170

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

333c wrote: post #90

maxbond wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom offers this feature, but you have to not-pay for it.

Works best when your meetings are 40 minutes long

Obviously, meetings shouldn't be longer than they need to be. But 15-20 minutes of unused time tend to be dead. That's mostly not long enough to do anything useful.

That said, nothing wrong with 30 minute meetings. In my previous analyst stint we tried to default to that--especially for non-clients. Didn't need all the throat-clearing stuff and industry background that we knew perfectly well.