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How to Attend Meetings

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Re: How to Attend Meetings

#71

Post by oconaros »

Change management is the issue, not meeting management. I worked for an agency who hired productivity consultants[1] to help with meetings, email, and time management. I thought it was a very courageous choice. It’s extremely hard to measure the impact of this type of engagement, and some people hated it. The system was good though.

I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I’ve tried many productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that stuck (other than GTD).

Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a stan

[1] https://doublegemini.com/

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#72

Post by parliament32 »

maccard wrote: post #62
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #52

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. Sometimes it's not just about whether others think you should be there.

I echo the parents sentiment - I don’t need to be there for a one hour meeting while 12 people give a perspective on a topic, but if you make the wrong decision I will say no. My job as a higher level manager is to ensure that whoever is there on our behalf avoids stupid decisions being made, and if I can’t delegate that then I need to go myself. Sometimes its unavoidable, and sometimes politics prevail but 95% of th…

> if you make the wrong decision I will say no

While I know your heart is in the right place, as someone with a reporting structure on both sides, I can tell you that this kind of handholding is the entire reason they keep making bad decisions. You must let people fail, and from there your entire job is ensuring that winding back that decision is the responsibility of the people who made it. Few decisions are irreversible, and everything will almost always work out in the end despite how it feels at the time -- but letting people fail, then making them clean up after themselves, is possibly the absolute best teaching method out there.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#73

Post by makeitdouble »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #9

Had 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.

> Your boss

That requires your boss to be good at meetings, and in particular to take extra care of preparing meetings with well crafted agendas and not just setting up random spots where they spend the first 5min remembering the actually ultra important thing they needed to discuss with you.

I've never seen an org where that applies to most higher ups. In particular for stuff they don't want to leave in writing or are delicate subjects.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#74

Post by munk-a »

delusional wrote: post #59
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?

Because caring about your work, the people around you, and the quite frankly stuff in general is healthy and gives life meaning. If you go somewhere 8 hours a day, you'd like that place to matter to you. Anything else is just depressing.

You are correct that caring is important - but it also isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing it wrong.

Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either extreme and, especially folks that are naturally empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally for it.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#75

Post by ponector »

grvdrm wrote: post #51

Could NYT also produce two more guides? 1. How To Use Teams/Slack/Etc. 2. How To Use Email Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up. Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make email intentional and high-value. Point being:…

There is no sense to send email with several points/questions. People select two of ten point to answer conveniently ignoring the rest.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#76

Post by icedchai »

wiseowise wrote: post #55
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #52

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. Sometimes it's not just about whether others think you should be there.

> 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?

Some people want the projects they're involved with to actually be successful?

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#77

Post by magneticnorth »

tyre wrote: post #67
hoherd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.

I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(

YMMV whether this will fly in your company culture, but I titled mine "Focus time, please ask before scheduling".

And when people inevitably didn't ask, I'd just decline unless I especially wanted to attend. I find myself getting invited to meetings sometimes just because the organizer wants to be inclusive and make sure everyone is looped in who might want to be, and I figure that's what's going on if they added me without asking.

If it's really important for me to be there, they'll see my time block and ask me.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#78

Post by rukuu001 »

tyre wrote: post #67
hoherd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.

I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(

Google Cal will auto-decline meetings that occur during ‘out of office’ events.

I have several of these ‘out of office’ events recurring in my calendar that I use for concentrated work

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#79

Post by minkzilla »

tyre wrote: post #67
hoherd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.

I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(

To make them stick you have to decline meetings scheduled during that time

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#80

Post by jwnin »

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…

Not shilling, but Microsoft Teams with a Premium license does this, and it works very well. I am not sure how I feel about this, though - not everything needs to be 'on the record'. It's beneficial for most topics, but most != all.

In one conversation, their AI saw right through me tiptoeing around a delicate matter where a problem was caused by a client's inaction. The meeting summary laid it out correctly, but it wasn't great from a relationship perspective.

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