Meetings at my company are derailed by having a lot of Ph.Ds who cannot ask a question or make a comment without spending 5 minutes talking, usually repeating the same thing over and over in different ways. If I schedule a 25 minute meeting and write an agenda with three topics in it, we'll get through half of one topic in that meeting. So I plan to schedule 2x50 minute meetings on separate days. It's a catastrophic waste of time.
And you can't ask people to submit questions or read documents or watch demo videos in advance, because they just won't do it. They'll say "my schedule is so full of meetings, I couldn't do the prep work". Well, it's full of meetings because we have 2x50 minute meetings to do what we should be able to do in one 25 minute meeting.
1. Dedicate the first X minutes of the meeting to reading the document. It sucks, and you shouldn't have to, but clearly people aren't doing their homework, so you gotta give them time to do it during the meeting.
2. "I couldn't do the prep work" "Ah, I'm sorry to hear that. I'll cancel this meeting right now, since we cannot proceed without that; everyone can use the freed up time to go over the prep work required, and I'll re-schedule this meeting for later in the week."
The second option requires you to have both the confidence to say this, and the credit to unilaterally cancel-and-reschedule a meeting and to call people out in such a way. But if the meetings are useless anyway, cancelling and rescheduling one doesn't sound like a big loss.
in my experience the second option is majorly jarring for those who did the homework and derails timelines. Often i've found if something is that low priority that it can be delayed for days to weeks then it's not actually important enough to spend time on.
Well, it 1) needs to be jarring so that it creates social pressure to address the issue, 2) it needs to implicitly be temporary, to institute a culture shift, or get the people who refuse to adjust to move to other roles.
Consider that the alternative in this scenario is not to solve the tasks in the meeting in the allotted time, but to waste time holding a meeting where things don't get resolved because people haven't prepared.
Well, some folks do a lateral shift and simply stop having the meetings and solving the issues through other channels. Slack, google doc comments, 1-1s in a network of gossip protocol...
That's great when it works. But it often does not work with the kind of people who fail to do prep work outside of meetings. Playing chicken with them over who will fail to get things done the longest before calling a meeting to force the issue is no fun.
People won’t read ahead because they’re already too busy with other stuff.
I suspect this is why Amazon has adopted a policy of silent reading time at the start of a meeting. You can’t expect busy people to spend hours prepping.
Replied this in a previous comment, but I'm making it such that if someone preps a meeting they HAVE to assign a responsible person for each and every talking point.
When they do this, that person gets a notice saying they have something to prepare ahead of time for.
SO even if they don't have enough time to look at the whole agenda, they can easily identify what exactly they need to pinpoint-prep for.
Why not dedicate half of the meeting to giving people time to read documents or watch demo videos? Then submit questions that can be addressed while the content is fresh in everyone’s mind.
You end up doing that, out of necessity. But it's worse in every way: people have to read and formulate questions under time pressure, rather than when it's comfortable for them. Anyone who did read (or helped write) the documents in question is sitting around wasting their time. And of course it doesn't make the meeting any shorter.
At Amazon we had a policy that each meeting starts with a memo and reading period. Every issue you brought up is true, but also pretty easy to get past.
> people have to read and formulate questions under time pressure
People who aren't good at that still have the option to read ahead of time. They need to know themselves to figure out which kind of person they are. They also have the option to submit feedback after the fact.
> Anyone who did read (or helped write) the documents in question is sitting around wasting their time.
Usually if you were an author or already read it, you either did your emails, wrote your next document, or just showed up after reading period. Sometimes you'd use that as your lunchtime if you WFH while you waited for people to read your doc. Or you would read the comments as they were being left on your document in real time so you could respond or do more research.
But I always managed to fill the time with something else productive. You adapt pretty quickly.
> And of course it doesn't make the meeting any shorter.
This is 100% true. It makes them longer and slows down decision making. But it also tends to mean that decisions can be made (and are recorded right in the doc!) in one meeting instead of multiple meetings, since the main thoughts are already written down.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good idea. I found most of the meetings run that way to be a waste, because they indexed on "every meeting starts with a document" even when it wasn't necessary. But it might be helpful to try it for one or two meetings where you are wasting a lot of time talking about things that could have been written down.
Sounds like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place my friend. Hope things get better for you but it sounds like there is no meeting format that would work for your team.
Maybe just cut out meetings entirely and see how that goes.
Works for some companies (i.e. Amazon), but many hate doing this.
I'm making it such that if someone preps a meeting they HAVE to assign a responsible person for each and every talking point.
When they do this, that person gets a notice saying they have something to prepare ahead of time for.
SO even if they don't have enough time to look at the whole agenda, they can easily identify what exactly they need to pinpoint-prep for.
Hang on I thought Ph.Ds were socially awkward people who were passive and silent in meetings only occasionally asking brief questions with no follow up, and seem like they would prefer to just do the whole meeting in 2 or 3 emails. I am not sure which stereotype to believe anymore.
If we really want to get specific, phds are generally trained to be comprehensive in their discussions, rather than concise, which is a slightly different flavor of annoyingly verbose from the typical incompetent communicator or individual who was trained to be rewarded for volume of "participation" more than anything (the latter of which tends to creep into org structures anyway)
Not in my experience. At the last few companies I worked at, meetings were annoying for entirely different reasons, but not because of filibustering. People got in and out as quickly as possible. You occasionally met with someone who wouldn't answer a question straight, or make a statement in less than five paragraphs, but at this company it is the rule rather than the exception. The only difference I can point at to explain it is that I now work with mostly academics and scientists rather than software product people.
I created this tool to test this question by making it super easy to use gen AI to prepare a good agenda directly through an extension on the side of your calendar.
I noticed that I was in a ton of pointless meetings. Some were recorded, but I’d never go back and look at the recordings because the meetings were a waste of my time. I realized the common theme was none of these meetings were prepared well or at all.
One could look at meetings as a start-to-end process. AI transcripts and summaries are downstream of meetings. The problem is, if you have a bad meeting, you get bad AI transcripts and summaries - garbage in, garbage out.
Why not apply AI at the start of the meeting process where meetings are first created? Make people think of what they want to get out of the meeting, what they want to discuss, and who actually needs to be there.
In theory, this should result in people having:
> Fewer, shorter, and more efficient meetings
> High quality agendas with worthwhile talking points
> Healthy discussions that lead to an actual outcome
Therefore, the AI preparation tool should:
> Know what you want to get out of the meeting - i.e. what’s the objective?
> Use AI to create an agenda with relevant talking points to hit said objective
> Make you think of who should talk about each talking point and invite only those people
> Bonus points if it follows a repeatable structure and does all of this very quickly, which should totally be possible with AI
What do you all think? Less AI transcription/summarization and more AI meeting prep?
> Why not apply AI at the start of the meeting process where meetings are first created? Make people think of what they want to get out of the meeting, what they want to discuss, and who actually needs to be there.
It makes sense in principle. I wonder if the incentives work though, usually the people that suffer from the bad prep aren't the same people that are responsible for prepping the meeting. It could perhaps work though if people were free to decline meetings which hadn't been prepped, that way if you wanted people to attend you'd have to do the legwork to make it worth their time.
Nice, I worked on something similar during COVID but it was more about preparing and tracking needed discussions well enough that you don't have to have the meeting in the first place (company failed, open source code is at https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo). We found that, at least at that time, companies fell into two camps - they were already doing async well and writing things down and didn't need us, or they were just desperately waiting for COVID lockdowns to end so they could get people back into meeting rooms - they don't see it as a problem, had never seen it work any other way, and so we couldn't solve it for them.
If I can share anything or just talk through my experiences let me know. I think reducing time spent in nonsense meetings actually does make the world a better place for the humans in it, at least a little bit.
Hey -- this is great. We should connect. Would love to pick your brain and understand what you learned. I tried accessing your website, but seems to be down(?).
Let me know how we can chat - my email address is ashish.fernandez@meetrics.ai
If this is something you made and are looking for feedback, you can edit the title to put Show HN: at the beginning of the title which tells everyone they can discuss the thing being shown with the person who made it in the thread. It also makes it clear it's something people can try.
I love meeting recordings because they become an excuse that makes it easier to get out of pointless meetings...
(so yes, I'd love anything that gatekeeps the creation of meetings in a way that ensures the meetings I get added to are actually worthwhile instead of having to work around it).
No, that's the point. And I don't record them - but when people record a meeting it makes it easy to pretend you'll watch them and so not show up unless it actually matters to you.
I don't think I've ever watched a recording of a meeting.
Anyone who has a lot of meetings will tell you it's hard to remember what was said, what was promised etc. So people take notes but that's difficult. Transcripts are great.
I love transcripts because I basically can’t both take notes and actively pay attention (this was a huge problem with my trig and calc teacher in high school who insisted everyone take notes the entire class period and would get mad at you if she saw you not taking notes—I’d end the class with a bunch of pages of writing and no clue WTF any of it was about)
Yeah, it's like having a medical scribe around. Taking notes requires a different kind of attention than engaging in conversation, and the switching can be really difficult.
Anyway, even with a software scribe, meetings should probably end with attendees reviewing and agreeing on some kind of written document which will be the meeting's artifact. You know, so people can refer to it later. Of course this never happens, because in meetings people get bored and tired and it's easier to just give everyone the Zoom wave and crawl to the sofa.
> this was a huge problem with my trig and calc teacher in high school who insisted everyone take notes
I found at uni that well-prepared blackboard/overhead lectures were excellent for taking notes. I caught many small typos and misunderstandings as I would actively work through each step of the theorem/proof/problem as I wrote.
In hindsight I realized they must have spent a great deal of effort in preparing the lectures precisely such that they were easy to write down.
In contrast, the PowerPoint lectures we had was exactly like you describe. Either I could focus on writing stuff down, but then I couldn't really follow what they were saying, or I could focus on what they were saying but not write anything down. Either way I felt I was missing out, as writing stuff down made stuff stick magnitudes better.
I attributed this to the fact that PowerPoint doesn't lend itself to be easily transferred to notes, so it requires a transcription step that detracts from the lessons.
One professor of mine solved the PowerPoint issue by sharing his slides as well as the slide notes that he took time to prepare. He really didn't expect us to take notes, even though we did.
It's funny how people have to a large extent "forgotten" the deep organisational knowledge around meetings which used to - and still does in more formal context - ensure there's someone present whose role it is to take notes, and often to start meetings by reviewing notes and actions from the previous meeting.
I guess it's in large part due to a reduction in the number of secretaries and assistant roles in most companies, but while many part of those roles became redundant with word processing etc., producing good quality notes did not, exactly because meeting participants that need to focus on the meeting make really lousy note-takers.
Heck, I've been in meetings more than once where we referred back to the notes in the same meeting, and having good notes is amazing in those situations.
Often the issue isn't even meeting prep, but the meeting itself.
- presenting information: is often better in document form (if precise, concise, not fluf, with diagrams etc.) with the added benefit of potentially being able to fix error retrospectively (Note: Similar to presentations you don't want to obsess about spelling, grammar, style and bullet points often are the way to go. Avoid "story writing" at all cost, you are presenting information not telling a story.
- technical discussions: if done in meeting for anything non trivial leads often to sub-par results, interestingly that is in my experience also true for fast messaging style text communication (like e.g. slack motivates you to do). Thinking more before writing and also having all you questions/comments written down before sending any of them does in my experience works the best.
- teaching people: here meeting like things can be good if individualized to the learner and supplementary only. But often you wouldn't call it a meeting anymore. Transcripts can be quite nice in this case but as it should only be supplementary should be unnecessary.
- synchronizing work: Inefficient if mostly done through meetings, through sometimes having supplementary meetings for it can be useful.
- planing work: Often highly inefficient if mainly done through meetings, through finalizing a plan through a short meeting is a good idea.
- brain storming: Can be started by a meeting, should not be concluded by a meeting as mind tend to pop up ideas at the strangest times and should not diverge into technical discussions about the proposals.
combine that with how interruptive meetings can be having too frequent meetings seems like a sure fire way to reduce productivity
Because it's effectively free. Why wouldn't you use something that makes bad meetings slightly better even if it doesn't help good meetings (hypothetically)? You will have bad meetings. Guaranteed or your money back.
I see this is an ad that promises "perfect meetings every single time". If you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you.
Maybe this product does make it easier to prepare good meetings. You will still have bad meetings, and you will still benefit from automated transcripts. Again, there's basically no reason NOT to have automated transcripts.
My two bosses guarantee our team will never have a well-run meeting. They're both junior managers who were selected for immediate promotion when their managers left. Both of them will drift and ramble on new topics when we manage to complete an agenda ahead of schedule. I need to find a new team. Or maybe I could find new jobs for them and get myself promoted to their current job ...
I had a boss once who did this, whenever a meeting was done before the scheduled time, he would start talking about some vaguely relevant experience or similar. When someone asked about this, he actually said that he felt responsible for not wasting everyones time, now that they were there anyway. I think he just liked having a captive audience.
A well run meeting is a thing of efficient beauty.
The problem, is most people don't actually want to run a good meeting due to either having to accept the risk of whatever they're trying to do actually happening or not, or the risk of having to do other people's work if they run a meeting about it.
Corporations don't do things because they're better. They do things because somebody gets a promotion / comission / are easier / somebody bought some BS enterprise software.
And you can't ask people to submit questions or read documents or watch demo videos in advance, because they just won't do it. They'll say "my schedule is so full of meetings, I couldn't do the prep work". Well, it's full of meetings because we have 2x50 minute meetings to do what we should be able to do in one 25 minute meeting.