There's John Cleese's Meetings Bloody Meetings for good meeting hygiene training. Its entertaining and educational.
How to Attend Meetings
31–40 of 193 posts
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Wow, I might need to steal that idea for bypassing Jira discussions. I hate Jira with all my might.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#33Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly.
This seems to be missed by the author.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#34I 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…
> I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly.
My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
> I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message. Do you sound like a dick? Yes. Does it work? Also yes, unless you weren't actually required in that meeting, in which case it becomes a self-solving problem.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#35I 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…
AFAIK amazon is a rare exception.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#36Had an idea These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules. So... What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.
>What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.
What could this possibly accomplish? I accept meeting requests not because I have some perverse desire to waste my time (and everyone else's), but because when I fail to show up for meetings (as has happened, quite by accident), I get shit for it. The eastern European folks are constantly setting meetings before 8am, but they can't just set them and leave them there. They'd delete these, put them at another time, but forget to include my name in the list... and then my boss starts giving me hell for why I'm not showing up to them. Yeh, I love getting up at 5:30am just so I can psychically deduce that you're all in an early morning meet.
So now you'd want to spam up my inbox with 15% more meetings, but I have to guess which of these imbecilic invitations are the real ones, and to taunt me if I can't always tell? I'm not the problem here, punishing me can't improve this for anyone.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#37Interesting that "Small - Brainstorming" is marked as a bad meeting flavour.
I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've worked with are like this.
But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely must brainstorm then "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a brainstorming meeting.
Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse.
Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and practice most of it as well.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#38I 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
Check out Parakeet as well , faster and more accurate in my experience
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#39Had an idea These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules. So... What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.
When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way to get quality heads down time.
All of them were titled something like “$X WG” where X was what we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for “Working Group”.
We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I can provide value to any meeting that I’m invited to. That doesn’t mean it’s the most valuable thing I can do with my time (especially given how tragically frustrating most of them are).