Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Attend Meetings

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 193 posts

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#21

Post by wswope »

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…

Whisper-X does speaker-annotated transcripts nicely. I’ve used it for running multi-hour TTRPG sessions with friends and it worked hassle-free after setup.

https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#22

Post by maxerickson »

garciasn wrote: post #15
dasil003 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback shou…

I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees. There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines. Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.

In a functional organization, it's almost certainly going to be absurd to argue that you can't provide value to any of the meetings that you are invited to.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#23

Post by jpadkins »

garciasn wrote: post #15
dasil003 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback shou…

I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees. There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines. Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.

Intel in the 90s-2000s did. I did customer research on them (worked on powerpoint at the time). I was amazed that the CEO gave a mandate to the company that if an agenda was not posted to a meeting 24H before the meeting, you did not have to attend that meeting. They also had other crazy strict meeting rules that I forgot.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#24

Post by micromacrofoot »

dasil003 wrote: post #11
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…

That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback shou…

I've had one manager over 10 jobs spanning 40 years that was on board with this

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#25

Post by amanzi »

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…

Yeah, in my experience "attending" a meeting is almost never a choice. I think a better slide title would have been "Scheduling a meeting is a choice". I see so many meetings are created (with a default time slot of 30 minutes), for what could have been a 5 or 10 minute phone call or even just a quick email.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#26

Post by igor47 »

wswope wrote: post #21
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…

Whisper-X does speaker-annotated transcripts nicely. I’ve used it for running multi-hour TTRPG sessions with friends and it worked hassle-free after setup. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

I also do this with my ttrpg games!

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#27

Post by 0x3f »

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 seems like it might have the second order effect of increasing meeting volume, though, until the equilibrium point of it not actually reducing your workload.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#28

Post by grvdrm »

garciasn wrote: post #15
dasil003 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback shou…

I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees. There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines. Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.

> There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.

Exactly. Love the deck. Like you, agree with many things.

My similar suggestions (but a little looser):

1. Long meetings need agendas. But don't expect perfection. You can get away with no agenda in a short (30 or less) meeting.

2. Very large meetings need a DRIVER (person). I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no. I don't want free-form conversation in a large meeting. I want someone to drive the hell out of the meeting. Keep people in check!

Most important:

3. Do what you can to discover the underlying motivation of the meeting organizer and solve their motivation some other way. Recently sat through a disastrous JIRA-focused meeting. Talking about tickets, their purpose, their descriptions, etc. But I knew the person needed the data for executive-team reporting. So I offered to help fill in gaps (without a call) to improve their reporting. I saved myself future time, he got better reporting - a win.

Constant and outright decline behavior will probably backfire.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#29

Post by xivzgrev »

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…

Yea like having 20 people on a project update call may be a poor of their time, but for boss man it's a great use - everyone he needs in the same room! Don't need to chase anyone down and someone can chime in if something inaccurate is said

Way too much upside for this kind of "low value" meeting to disappear

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#30

Post by drums8787 »

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…

This is a big piece of what drove me out of corp jobs.

With a sufficient hourly rate people are less likely to have you waste time in meetings.

Or maybe I’ve just been lucky. Prob doesn’t work everywhere.

Post reply on HN