81–90 of 380 posts
If things are running over because of something important like the financial future or your org or the health and safety of your clients then people will deal with the spiders roaming at terrifying speeds. But if everyone is just bikeshedding then the room will empty out pretty quick.
The solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
The backstop forcing function to end meetings is the conference room being booked for the next slot... One of the things I noticed during COVID when everyone was remote was that meetings would never end on time b/c there was no contention for meeting rooms.
If I was in the room, I'd be relieved. I always found that meetings at large companies dragged on unless there was a forcing factor (like a doorknock) that got someone to bring it to an end.
Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.
Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
Oooh, my heroes! I hate when stated policy is treated as "just a paper" and ignored. I understand that sometimes it's temporary/transitional - OK, it happens. But when rule is present for long time and it becomes de facto standard to disregard it - either change the rule or start following it.
A contemptible law breeds contempt for all laws.
Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> neither side understands the other. Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people. Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time? As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541220 DonHopkins on June 12, 2017 | next [–] The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990. https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co... Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had…
If I was in the room, I'd be relieved. I always found that meetings at large companies dragged on unless there was a forcing factor (like a doorknock) that got someone to bring it to an end.