This post is not about useless meeting tips, nor about some new tool that drains remaining calendar hours.
Like most of us, I’m very frustrated by the amount of time wasted by meetings. Why most of us here hate meetings is well described in PG’s essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
There is also a great solution that worked for YC: office hours. Ok, but how can this help a regular maker in a regular company?
Most makers struggle with the meetings scheduled by their colleagues, so let’s focus just on the company internal meetings.
What if every maker will have her/his own office hours few times a week at different times? Yeah, that probably won’t work. Makers & managers often need to meet in 2+ groups...
OK, what if all makers within the company will have office hours at the same time? Would be nice, but that won’t scale as it will require too many conference rooms and switching rooms fast enough may not be possible if someone has six 10min meetings with different folks…
Oh, wait, but what about video meetings? There is no room limit there and switching rooms takes seconds. Many of us work in distributed companies with a lot of meetings online already. Great, but there is still a problem with agreeing on times and booking small meetings within those hours. Also, what to do if there is urgent discussion and everything is overbooked ahead of time with non-urgent managerial stuff?
OK, so that is what we are trying to solve with https://www.Meetter.ai and would love to hear what you think about the early version. Please check How Meetter Works section on the landing page for more details.
Here is an open demo account just for HN: https://hn.meetter.ai/signup-demo After sign-up, just try to post few agenda topics with random people and see if you can join office hours scheduled Tue/Wed/Thu at 8 AM PT.
A couple of months doing that in a new job, explaining the rational where necessary, usually sorts the problem out.
With Meetter if someone is a CEO of a company and wants to cut the costs on time wasted because of meetings, this will be a lot faster to achieve than just educating whole company on how to run meetings.
The problem is lack of good communication skills. Whether it is inability to write concise emails that have clear actionable tasks or resolution or having agenda for meetings and someone who will force the meeting forward. The other thing that drives this is managers (project, product, technical) who feel they must know everything about everything related to the project. Lack of clear roles and job descriptions exacerbates this issue and you end up with a lot of people only interested in job preservation.
Unlike the slack approach, with Meetter micro meetings are clustered inside predefined hours during the day to avoid distraction. You can set it as the last hour at the end of the work day and get 7 hours of no distraction. Also, if there are multiple topics with the same group of people - these will be merged into one within that hour, say if for some reason you have six five minutes long topics with other two people - you will get one productive thirty minutes to talk.
Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and praised.
If you think of how much time you spend in meetings, some sort of meeting instruction/meeting consultant might just pay for itself in increased productivity.
I am not a meeting consultant or a manager, but using robert's rules of order in a hobby community made me much better at meetings.
Simple ideas like having the problem clearly stated, asking for proposed solutions, debating them by going back and forth from opposed to in support so that it's clear when the minority has all been heard from without having everyone have to put in 2 cents, only including actual stakeholders etc.
Anyway that's not to distract from this effort, this seems like a great solution to any scheduling problems if nobody is in an open office.
Of course video calls work best when everyone has private office space without an open plan.
I agree with this, a lot of this is human error and inefficiency and tendency to fill spaces
> Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and praised.
Not to take away from the good point of gender discrimination, but this happens a lot of guys too. It's a cut-throat world...
Like if someone says, "The front end is extremely slow loading the SPA in the browser because of legacy cruft," I see a lot of people relate that to their area or generalize, either "Analytics also takes forever, the email queue needs more workers/the db has slow queries, building the app takes too long, the mobile app take forever to sign in" etc etc, or "the whole tech stack is slow and needs improvement."
No doubt all true, and sure perhaps speeding up DB queries by indexing on user email or whatever would speed up loading for signed in people, but the front end is still slow to load, and bringing up other issues doesn't solve the specific problem raised, if you get my point.
Basically, it used guided questions to get you to give structure to your meetings. I will add some of your suggestions, they sound very good.
I should also get around to releasing it one of these days...
We are working on Slack integration too, it will be possible to create & schedule Meetter topics right from Slack or from Teams.
But, what happens if we try to de-centralize the organizers? What if anybody can play a role of organizer of much smaller meetings (10 mins vs 60 mins)? What if there is a limit on how many meetings can be scheduled a day (1 hour vs 8 hours)? What if time reservations are not based on the first-in rule, but dynamic and based on the priority?
If you would like to try it with your team in your own Meetter account with own hours schedule, just email the name of the organization to <my first name>@meetter.ai or simply sign-up from the landing page. I promise to respond with new account URL quickly.
Appreciate any feedback! Gene Podolyak
If that is a bit more complicated like: US, Europe & Australia. You may need to setup hours on 3 different intersections and people can decline those that don’t work for them and Meetter will use that information for scheduling.
Unless you can find a tool to make these people understand the culture has a problem (also the hierarchy), I don't think any new tool can help.
Note: Basecamp, zoho and all others promise similar tools. You might want to change the intro video, maybe invest in voice-over with basic demo.
The problem we see is that companies in their transition from physical office to a virtual and distributed workplace carried over all the meeting habits that are outdated.
We believe there is no longer need in standing meetings with fixed audiences.
With Meetter, you are basically setting your weekly meetings budget for the whole company and let topics compete for that time. This is a lot different from what is happening today: meetings fight for all the available time on everyone's calendar.
Meetter hours are not finalized until 15 minutes before the start. High priority, smaller and shorter topics win. Meetter makes all meetings about what they should be: about solving problems, not about socializing & sharing updates - there are less expensive ways to do that.
Can tool change the culture? We are optimists and believe they can.
Compare the difficulty of doing project task tracking in MS Word versus JIRA/Trello/Basecamp.
With meetings, we are still at MS Word stage and Meetter is a JIRA/Trello for meetings.
If I have committed something, updated a ticket, run a deployment, resolved a pagerduty issue, moved a work task from Planning to Doing, etc, then automate retrieving this work log and pre-populate it in the meeting invite. All members of the meeting can see the work and can ask about it if they need to. The individual then doesn't need to state what work they did, but only mention their blockers.
I believe this would benefit virtually any group with a stand-up meeting. It's a lot of integration work, though. Might already exist, I'm not sure.
I feel like many meeting habits and practices are evolved from the physical office environment that has limitations that are not present in the virtual world.
Btw, check out this talk from Al Pittampali at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn-q529ExFw One of the keystone habits he is advocating is "Make all standing meetings tentative"
If I'm using Meetter to automatically schedule a stand-up, I (presumably) can say, only schedule the meeting if we have blockers to discuss, and only invite the people who are mentioned in the issue/blocker. But how to determine if there's blockers, and who to invite? Query the issue tracker.
You could look up blocked GitHub or ZenHub Issues and generate a stand-up to discuss them once they happen, and maybe re-generate a stand-up after X time if they have not been updated, to prevent stale blockers.
What I get out of this is when I work for a company which requires stand-ups, I don't have to go to them if I have no blockers. I know I would pay for that privilege :-)
For now, it is possible to implement the same workflow with the current version of Meetter just by asking someone to check task tracker for blockers about 30 minutes before the Meetter hour and manually create topics.
The partial pivot to automating web meetings is a neat idea, but the immediate concern I would see there is that now you're fighting two fairly heavily entrenched spaces, calendars and web meetings. Twice the battle fronts might mean twice the opportunities to exit, but it also might mean twice the opportunities to be out-competed/exhausted?
So Meetter can do alomost everything you described. I will let you know when we have tweaked it.
I'd like to thank everyone for the feedback and for trying meetter this week.
We will be closing demo account this week. You are still more than welcome to sign-up for early access here: https://www.Meetter.ai
Good luck!
Gene