alt Hacker NewsStart your meetings at 5 minutes past
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We've been doing this at Qualcomm for a while, and I really like it. While meetings do run over sometimes, the practice has still built this acceptance around short breaks between meetings. No one bats an eye if we've got two consecutive meetings together, the first one ends late, and we wait five minutes before starting or joining the next one.
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
“More social pressure to stop at the top of the hour.”
False.
This doesn’t work.
Source: a company doing this. Meetings just continue on to the 5 after mark.
Back to back meetings?! Why on earth would you do that?
This ensures meetings will begin at 10 minutes past
How about not having meetings that could have been an Email?
In my experience, if the meeting is important enough policies like this don't matter.
People magically show up on time and pay attention and the meeting ends on time or early.
I have to assume this discussion is about the 90% of meetings that could have been a group chat or email chain.
Seems like a technical solution to managerial problem.
this rule makes all worse sorry. our PO/BE tries to do this but no one cares anymore. why not just start/end at a given time? meeting starts at 9, be there, it ends at 10, rage quit.
There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets.
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
some teams at my org start 5 mins past some don't... result, some people hop on early and keep waiting and some meetings ppl don't show up for at least 5 mins.
My 2 cents, just make the damn meetings 20 minutes or 50 minutes, and start at sharp. I absolutely hate the 5 minutes past, as I am ALWAYS late on them, or 5 minutes early.
Fixed time makes it so much easier to reason than random stuff.
I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.
At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.
Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.
It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
start at 1pm. end at 1:45 or 1:55pm. known wise pattern for a long time
honor end times so everyone has a few minutes to take a bathroom break or move to a diffrrent room, or prep mentally, etc
I suggested this to management at my company and they shot it down almost immediately. Narrow-minded middle manager types generally aren't receptive to this kind of out-of-the-box thinking unless they think it's an idea they've come up with.
The problem with these kinds of advices is that it requires ALL teams to have buy-in to this idea.
As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.
The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.
The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:
1. Don't have back to back meetings
2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda
3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.
Well, I simply don't accept nor attend meetings that are setup directly after another meeting. There must be also time to pee, poop, drink, prepare, etc. in between them. At least 30mins gaps between meetings is a must have for me.
But yeah, this guy work for google, says it all.
Don't schedule too many meetings to begin with. It's absolutely ridiculous to have your day fully packed with online meetings.
And join early of it's convenient, but actually spend those first 5 on social interaction. Because one problem with online meetings is they feel "all business" without explicitly making time to just be humans.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots.
Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.
We start the meeting at 2 minutes past. Meetings end at 10 minutes before the hour (or half hour) - yes, "30 minute" meetings are only effecitvely 18 minutes, but we leave a few minutes of buffer.
Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.
If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.
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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.