How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

> if the goal is instead to deliver info to the attendees, your meeting should be an email

If we just stuck to this rule I would have hours of more time to do actual work.

So many “meetings,” are listening to folks um-and-ah their way through their slides. They read the exact text they wrote. Slowly. It’s painful.

Just send an email.

If this happens in recurring meetings, make an email digest.

> nobody reads anything, for the most part, and when they do, they act like they didn’t.

It's actually even more insidious than a lack of reading comprehension.

It's a lack of retention in memory. People read an email, it blends in with all the other email they read, it lacks salience, it's the metaphorical "in one ear, out the other". Text lacks immediacy so it doesn't get attention, retention, or action.

This is, needless to say, not a solvable problem within any given team, company, or industry.

Edit: The irony of writing this in a HN comment does not elude me.

The main issue that this gets at is that meeting time is a valuable company resource and a contentious resource for employees and should be managed as such.

People shouldn’t feel free to chime in with half-baked ideas in meetings or call meetings willy-nilly any more than they would play horseshoes with equipment from the supply closet, use the company credit card for grocery shopping, or call in sick to play golf.

What appropriate policies look like probably do vary by company and team but the policy shouldn’t just be that anyone with access to the calendar software can call a meeting or that anyone in the meeting can speak at any time.

For everyone else who felt similarly, the explanation is in the previous post (linked near the top of the intro). I also found this confusing because the whole intro felt like it was building up to define the concept and explain why it’s a (the) problem. I even googled the term, thinking it may be some term of art I’m just not familiar with. Then I looked back at the intro again, and inferred that it must be pointing back into the post series… just conveying that poorly.

It seems to me that the problem isn’t that remote meetings suck but that meetings suck. My writing group meets remotely because (a) covid and (2) one of the members moved to Ohio from Chicago. We manage not to have the issues about people interrupting etc., likely because we (a) care about what we’re doing and (2) actually that caring about what we’re doing really covers it. We do have structure in that we’re workshopping 2–3 stories per session and we have a four-part agenda for each story (aboutness, likes, suggestions, questions). Everybody has done the necessary homework before the meeting (in this case read the stories and written up their notes), but the structure means that we avoid a common workshop trap of everybody just reading their notes to the group and since you know your notes will go to the writer, you don’t need to feel obligated to say everything you’ve written down.

Thinking about this, I can see pretty clearly how this could be translated into work meetings pretty easily and fits with a lot of the other commentary here.

But bottom line, either the meetings will suck or they won’t and what matters is not whether they’re in-person or remote but how they’re run.