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How to Attend Meetings

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Re: How to Attend Meetings

#171

Post by wiseowise »

somanyphotons wrote: post #66
wiseowise wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting. Unless your head is on the line, why do you care?

Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months

> Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months

From my experience it is going to happen regardless of whether you pay attention or not. People will fuck up, period. Compulsively being hypervigilant will drive you insane.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#172

Post by Aeolun »

maxerickson wrote: post #155
blackqueeriroh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m looking for where GP or even the original presentation said that no meetings were worthwhile or otherwise necessary. Can you help me find it?

The context I'm pulling in is by the caps in the comment I initially replied to, would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING . Note the caps. As far as the GP, what I'm getting at is that they are tediously nitpicking my phrasing rather than addressing my point. If there are some meetings that make sense to spend your time on, (in the context of my comment) what the fuck does it matter if there are also some that…

The nuance is that most meetings aren’t worth my time, even if I can add value to being in all of them.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#173

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

garciasn wrote: post #7

I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it. --- For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of…

> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.

One approach that I've seen work is start the meeting by having everybody read a document (see https://www.sixpagermemo.com). It's fresh on everybody's mind, and everybody just read the same content.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#177

Post by PaulCarrack »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #176
PaulCarrack wrote: post #151

Link is dead. Did anyone make a copy that can reupload?

I would also like a copy, someone in this community must have made a copy. #Mirror for quick searcher's.

It really is a tragedy. I can't find it anywhere and I really wanted to reference it for future meetings.

@spagoop can you reupload it?

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#178

Post by Matticus_Rex »

krackers wrote: post #103
arjie wrote: post #18

I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer. e.g. if someone has a meeti…

This won't happen in tech companies because that would make legal discovery a lot easier.

I thought that, too, but I'm seeing lots of companies in tech implement this almost by default because it's built-in to tools that are adding a lot of tangible value.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#179

Post by codemac »

earthdeity wrote: post #127
codemac wrote: post #81

While I have several disagreements with this deck, there are two large ones: 1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to p…

While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful. I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that: 1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several time…

You are thinking in terms of utility, instead of organizational power. Which is fine - but misses why the meeting behavior continues imo.
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