41–50 of 147 posts
"This meeting could have been an email." - yeah, if people actually read their emails.
What’s the point when you know there will be a meeting about the topic?
No response, resends email 2 or 3 times
Sends Invitation "Meeting to Agree whether X or Y."
XX replies to original email with an answer
Meeting is cancelled
Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time. Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating…
Btw, question to the wisdom of HN: Good meetings need minutes. Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced? Preferrably somewhat…
Well first off, do you actually need all that? How formal are these meetings? Ours are pretty informal, we (unfortunately) use MS Teams which has an agenda & notes section; people are asked to fill in the agenda if they have any points (which is frustrating because getting there isn't easy or obvious), people can write down notes and action points during the meeting (it's a shared and collaborative effort). You can a…
But you could be right, this might not be the unifying tool for everything but more like number 29 that has never replace the previous 28...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value of written notes really adds up over time, though. Once a meeting is over, it's over; a Slack conversation is preserved for new hires or absentees or yourself when you return to it after your vacation. I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation s…
I have never searched old chats for anything but passwords, network folder paths and license keys. Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?
No fluff, no descriptions other than simple labels, no ten paragraph intro blurb, no index, nothing that I would normally skip over when reading someone else's document.
I call these "cheat sheets" and send them out to colleagues on their first day on a project. I've heard feedback along the lines of "I got 10x more value from that one page than three weeks of 'handover' from other people."
this feels like advice for the person running the meeting, not the one being dragged into it. I'm just picturing myself telling my boss "Sorry, this meeting doesn't have a clear goal, so I'm dropping off." Anyone actually have the guts to do this when you're not the senior person in the room?
Can't speak for your boss, but I definitely am sometimes a few abstraction layers further up in concepts than the ICs on the team, and it's a lot more frustrating to realise the others don't really know what I'm getting at because I didn't create clear enough goals than getting that feedback right away. People in leadership usually get there because they value time and efficiency, and if you don't spin that as "your…
Equally if not way more often they are there, because they like to control things or organize things or like having power or see it as career setup. Or they like working with people.
Time and efficiency is not something you get on these positions.
this feels like advice for the person running the meeting, not the one being dragged into it. I'm just picturing myself telling my boss "Sorry, this meeting doesn't have a clear goal, so I'm dropping off." Anyone actually have the guts to do this when you're not the senior person in the room?
Or just counter-schedule a meeting in the same slot.
this feels like advice for the person running the meeting, not the one being dragged into it. I'm just picturing myself telling my boss "Sorry, this meeting doesn't have a clear goal, so I'm dropping off." Anyone actually have the guts to do this when you're not the senior person in the room?
- "I have many meetings already and worry about not meeting deadline".
- "I do not have strong opinions either way, so am fine getting just outcome".
- "I do not have knowledge to be useful".
- "It seems like I wont be useful".
Basically, you can guess these from the topic alone. Most of the time, the response is something like "of course no problem" sometimes followed by short explanation why I was called in. Occasionally they say they indeed want me there.
1:1s. Not really skippable, necessary part of work..
Update meetings: team update, all hands, demos, etc. Record and share out a link . Let people watch in their own time. Optionally do the meeting live (in person, online, etc.) for whoever wants to be physically/digitally present and "watch at 1x speed"
Decision meetings. Adhoc only and only when more efficient than taking a decision async (Slack, shared document, etc.) - shouldn't be skipped as these can be crucial for maintaining alignment
Planning meetings. Backlog grooming, retro, standup. Pare these back to their component pieces. Make more of the component pieces async over time. Can you groom the backlog purely async? Can standup be a Slack bot? Can retro be part of 1:1s, or another Slack bot? Other teams have found ways!
And then call out meetings' categories so your team can cull certain types of meetings.
First, a meeting is primarily not a way to spread knowledge. Knowledge should be spread in a format that is more resilient to time than our memories (which are surprisingly untrustworthy over even tiny time scales). For example; written text. The greatest benefit of text is that it can be asynchronously consumed, multiple times. Meetings are primarily for two things: I think this makes sense in the abstract but not a…
Ultimately, in my experience, it often requires both. Written and oral communication. Some don’t listen, some won’t read. It’s not only a function of the specific person but also depends on the day who reads and who listens. So, yeah, in theory, in an ideal world with perfect co-workers you wouldn’t need so many meetings. In the real, messy world we live in, meetings are one tool to make sure important messages come…