Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.

Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.

I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:

1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late. 2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. 3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.

The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.

In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.

> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.

I've never seen this pressure.

> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.

It's like I live in an entirely different world.

Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.

Good idea, after trying it a number of times, it has some downsides. Most calendar applications cannot clearly display 5 minutes past, and the meeting appears to start on the hour visually. One of the attendees ends up dialling in at the hour, and then everyone gets a notification that the meeting has started.

Half of the people who get the notification click "join" without checking. This ends up with a half-populated meeting room. The issue becomes obvious, and somebody says, "Let's dial back in 5 mins", and drops off. Half of the people like the idea and drop off, while the rest decide to stay and chat.

Meanwhile, some of those who dropped off see this as a great opportunity to grab a brew. That inadvertently triggers some water-cooler, kettle-corner chats, and they end up running late for the 5-past. The rest usually get engaged in something else to make use of 5 minutes, and miss 5-past since no new notifications are issued due to the people already chatting in the meeting :)

We do this at my work and guess what - meetings tend to run 5 minutes late because everyone knows the next meeting doesn’t start until 5 past.

I want Teams to show me the dollar cost of meetings. Enter an approximation of the average salary for people involved in the meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting, and broadcast the cost ticking up every second to every person in the meeting.

I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.

I have found significant frustration since the pandemic in the most unexpected place: the new expectation of punctuality for online meetings. In meatspace, in the before times, if a meeting was set for 2pm in the board room, everyone understood this to mean 2pm was the time to come through the door and chat for a bit while everyone got comfortable. The actual meeting would start at 2:05-2:10.

Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.

I was bad in being on meeting discipline. The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals. If someone joins late, they catch up from notes/recording.

There’s a famous example from the Lucasfilm/Pixar deal: a Lucasfilm exec used to arrive late as a power move, until Steve Jobs started the meeting exactly on time without him. The exec walked in 5 minutes later and had already lost the room. And Jobs gets the deal.

I work in a university environment.

The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).

I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.

I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.

How about just be punctual, respecting the time others have agreed to meet with you? Simpler solution than what this article suggests. People will abuse that system just the same anyway.

In my experience, the recipe for having meetings interface smoothly with the time that surrounds them is twofold:

1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.

2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.

That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.

You start on time, you end on time.

The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.

But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)

Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.

This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.

Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.

I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.

From the article:

  I work as an Engineering Manager ...

  If you try to end at 1:55pm, you will likely talk until 
  2:00pm anyway, which then runs into the next meeting.

Engineering Managers which see value in giving coworkers a five minute break between meetings ensure the breaks exist. Those which do not and only pay lip service to the concept will burn through predefined breaks no matter where they exist on a clock face.

I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.

If you truly believe in this, just effectively block Teams between :55 and :05 every hour. You can always allow exceptions with presubmitted motivation.

Shifting everything from :00 to :05 is theatre at best, and a slippery slope more often.

A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly important when power dynamics might otherwise derail real discussion.

Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.

Better idea: write code. Don't waste your teams' time with back-to-back hour-long meetings.

I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).

We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.

For some larger meetings during the pandemic, managers started scheduling them 5 minutes after to give people time to join, but because people's reminders triggered at the same relative time all it meant was people started joining meetings 5 minutes later negating any perceived benefit.

At my job, when the meeting time is over it is over. So everyone knows that they need to work the thing during the allocated time. People might skip or leave the meeting at any time or simply say they need more context before attending.

Zero BS If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.

If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.

The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves

We got bunch of internal meetings starting at quarter past instead of full hour and mostly we can get it finished in 45mins.

Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.

A similar concept has been used for university lectures to start 15 minutes after the full hour. This was due to nobody having watches and everything being synced to the church bells ringing at the full hour. Then you had 15 minutes to get to the next lecture (in another building). Starting time was given as ct (cum tempore, with time) or st (sine tempore, without time). Usually only st was marked as everybody assumed the 15 minutes delay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...

Doesn't anyone have to hit the can between meetings?

Or are we all using catheters now?

Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.

You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.

People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.

> Like good code, a good team is built on small, sane details.

Words to live by.

Also known as Oxford Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_time

When I lead a meeting, I start right on time no matter what. Guess what? People come on time.

For companies using Google Calendar as the primary meeting scheduler, one issue with this is that there's a setting for short meetings, but it only supports ending the official meeting 5 or 10 minutes early: "End 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings 10 minutes early".

But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.

It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.

You are treating the symptoms by doing this. If you are a serious manager then you should be serious about time management. Making sure your team has discipline is a manager problem and consistently being late shows that there are fundamental, principle discipline problems with your team.

When the start/end doesn’t matter as much for my team as changing the default duration to 25/50 minutes. This way even if a meeting would start at the quarter hour you would always end up with a small gap between.

Maybe I’m just a silly lab engineer who doesn’t know how big companies work (i did work at a startup for a time but that’s even more anti meeting than a lab) but I feel like maybe if you have so many back to back meetings that you need to plan around them you should have fewer meetings?

Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?

Apart from just a quick breather between back to back meetings, it also provides a critical bio-break time for your attendees.

Meetings run long so frequently that we now recommend starting the next meeting late to compensate.

This will surely solve the problem.

Depends on the booking system. If it is hourly it will usually be X:00-Y:00 and if you overrun that you may have to pay for another hour.

This works even better if your neighboring teams start their meeting at hour or half hour. Then towards the end of the meeting you can say "I'm getting kicked out of the office".

I don't remember the last time i had a meeting that was productive. Last time i worked in the office, the hallway discussions where the productive ones and now working remote most of the time is just being able to work with good people that understand text and work by messages that works good. Even video meetings with good people tends to be waste of time.

Creative idea, however most calendar software clients offer meeting start times rounded to increments of 15 min.

Setting meetings to start at :05 or :20 or :35 or :50 adds friction.

Defaults matter for habit formation.

There is your golden opportunity to point out internal Gemini to the Calendar codebase and make it become reality.

Hour long meetings are a red flag. Meetings should be a maximum of 30 mins.

For fully remote workers, that few minutes chat before the meeting starts is one of the few opportunities for unstructured chat with their colleagues

I'd say we shouldn't have more than a couple of meetings a day so it should be eady to not have back to back ones.

It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.

> You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.

We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.

I've been doing this for a year or two. Love it, but haven't made it a thing across my team...and I'm not sure they love it as much as I do :P

They usually do. Scheduling them for 5 past just means they'll actually start at 10 past.

Where I work, we have company-wide breaks between 10.00-10.15, 12.00-13.00 and 15.00-15.15. These cannot easily be enforced with external parties, but running an internal meeting over a break will need an explanation. What I noticed is that back-to-back meetings are more likely "capped" at 2 hours, so it's easier for people to show up on time and energized.

If you have so many back-to-back meetings, maybe put in a school bell that chimes at 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the hour. Please just put this in your conference rooms so those of us who know how to evade meetings don't have to hear it as well.

Our org does 5 minutes past for a 30-minute window, and 10 minutes past for an hour or longer. Works great once everyone gets it. Can be confusing for new hires.

I'd recommend taking this even further. Start every meeting 30 minutes after the hour, and end it 30 minutes before the hour.

We do this at Meta. It’s stupid, because all meetings just go 5 minutes afterwards

Perhaps reduce the number of meetings so they're not back-to-back?

MIT does this. Every class starts 5 mins past, and also ends 5 mins early.

We did this at Google too while I was there (only the started 5-mins past part). It works really well.

No need to change the Calendar events though. It's just implicit that we'll start 5-mins past. (Or, well, explicit in MIT's case).

Seems a mismanagement issue - making sure everyone is on time - transformed into a calendar scheme.

If you can’t tell people to stop being late, you are not doing your job as a manager.