Hidden in here is the “reasonable default” change for meetings from 1 hour to 30 minutes.
If you havent already done so, go and change your entire organizations default meeting length to 30 minutes. Force people to justify why they need an hour. Still not sure why it isnt the default.
25 minutes and everything starts at either XX:05 or XX:35.
People get to be human and do things like use the restroom, get a drink, or just take a breath in between meetings without being flustered and apologizing for being late.
I just sprinkle short events that show me as “busy” and start at odd offsets like :15 and :45 so I can have some blocks of time where I get to take a break from meetings and do some of the work that stems from those meetings (otherwise when the hell do I do the work). The weird offsets really confuse calendaring applications :) which always try to align things to :30 or :00.
I do that and keep my calendar private so people can't see they're productivity blockers. If something's important, people will ask me if I can free up a slot for them. If it isn't important they usually don't bother asking, which is just as well.
I value transparency as a leader, and so I keep my calendar public and encourage my teams to do so as well. However, sometimes I'll just block off some time with the word "busy" as the title. It looks like it's a private event, but it's really just me taking some time for myself. People will assume that someone just made a private meeting with me. You get the benefit of both sides that way. It's worked well for me in the past.
On the other hand, I may have way fewer meetings than many others that might get invited to the same meetings, so I understand it can be hard to find a time where everyone is available.
I've only been to one company that had a sane meeting culture. Along with every meeting invitation there were attached documents that you were expected to read. You were expected to have notes and comments ready. The meetings mostly were not supposed to be a time where you worked vague things out.
In my last few jobs, there has been the option to set a meeting to private. It shows on your calendar but people can’t see the title or other details. You could create multiple shorter events if you think people would be suspicious of a single multi-hour meeting.
The sentiment and logic here is good but I think all employees have to agree otherwise wastes some time for those folks who do show up on time.
My personal observation is the timing matters less than the number of participants. More people usually equals less insights and more wasted time. One rule could be "if you can't emerge with an action item you shouldn't be here." But I'm not sure if that's practical as an organization grows and social/political relationships matter more.
Not everyone takes an action item out of the meeting. Some people provide information to the meeting. But if you're not contributing or taking something away, you should go, yes.
“An academic quarter (localized into various languages in the countries where it is practiced[a]) is the quarter-hour (15 minute) discrepancy between the defined start time for a lecture or lesson ("per schema") and the actual starting time, at some universities in Europe including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the United States.”
This was applied in 100% of classes at my university in Sweden. A 14-16 lecture would start at 14:15, take a break from 15-15:15 and end at 16. The practice was frequently applied in student union meetings and events.
However, while meetings were sometimes explicitly scheduled for a quarter past, if your thesis supervisor schedules a meeting at, e.g., 9 AM, then be sure not to show up at 9:15. :)
While in France they d start on time but the students would trickle down for 15 minutes. You can imagine our respective surprise when I had a german boss one day and I d arrive always 2 minutes late not understanding why it would be written on the meeting note as if it was a huge mega deal :D
Complete disrespect for him, absolutely the norm for me :D He learned to be less angry and I learned to be less "late"
It works really well, except for non-classes no one is ever sure if you were told UofT-time or normal-time. For example if you agree to meet with a prof or ta outside of class..
I think I would have preferred if they just always scheduled things at "xx:10 to yy:00" instead of having the ":10" as implicit.
Force people to justify why they need a meeting as well, have an agenda, keep a tight schedule, don't let people change the agenda or rant on. One thing I found in the scrum style meetings is that people love to be on the soapbox for their allotted time.
It's funny because we all think the grass is always greener and yet.. my most recent 2 job leads:
* a firm that was demanding devs return to office already in January pre-vaccine, justifying it by paying for Ubers & doing PCR testing in office
* a firm which in its job-spec explicitly listing that "8a-6p are standard hours" and "plus other hours as required for role / due to support / meetings out of region / some flexibility required"
We can push back by publicly shaming bad actors and ensuring they go to the back of the queue along with the firms with psychopathic interview processes when it comes to choosing tech talent at a time of high demand. Unionising would probably be better but for some reason a bad word around these parts...
The good thing about the ceremony is having the whole team see whats being planned and giving input and helping each other out. But there might be a more efficient way to do this. Get everyone to read a published "this is our roadmap" page or something like that.
I've organised those meetings. You could halve their length by doing most of the grooming yourself, and just saving the remaining questions for the team.
The meetings would only take a few minutes with Kanban, assuming the backlog stayed sorted. I just asked where the new tickets had to go in the current sorted list.
These meetings would be much faster if project managers didn't clog the backlog with stream-of-consciousness tickets.
However I was never an Agile guy. I trimmed the process heavily, and took up most of the backlog maintenance so that others could work.
This requires the organizer to be organized.
If management is running sprint ceremonies but in 5-6 hours/day of meetings, they come in unprepared and ad-lib.
Our product manager sits in on the meetings such that he can says yes/no when questioned on tickets, but for all I know could be watching soap operas given his level of engagement.
I think it all falls apart above a team size of 5-10.
Just a tedious slog.
The number of tickets you have to churn thru in backlog review / planning / closing / etc ceremonies is directly proportional to the number of devs..
And try have meeting free zones. 8 half hour meetings spread over a day is nearly as bad as 8 hour meetings in terms of getting work done, 30 mins gaps only allows for easy tasks (email, etc), but not true engineering/deeper work.
It would be awesome if every meeting had a scoreboard that displayed a running total of the cost of the meeting based on the salaries of the participants.
For me, the most important thing isn't that meetings be short - they can be a good way to build relationships as well as get work done, after all. The most important thing is for meetings to be bunched up with no gaps at either the beginning or end of the day, and never added to the schedule outside of those blocks
I feel 30 mins is often not enough to get things done, but if you give it an hour people get too "relaxed" or tune out.
So the best approach would probably be to schedule 30min meetings that are always followed by 30min free time; so that everyone knows there is an urgency to be brief, but it's not the end of the world if you overrun 10mins. Otherwise you end up with back-to-back meetings and "I have to go, sorry", even if we're not actually done, or the 1h snoozefests.
I think there is space for some software here, that could automatically tweak one's calendar to "block out" post-meeting time by a predetermined amount in Outlook (yes, don't try to pry people out of Outlook, you're not going to win).
> So the best approach would probably be to schedule 30min
> meetings that are always followed by 30min free time
It seems better to have no free time between meetings. That way everybody is much more motivated to keep them to the allotted time. 30 min is much too short an interval to do serious technical work.
Make it 25 minutes instead. Now there's a break of time in-between allowing your brain to properly context switch so your night's sleep isn’t messed up.
The only problem with this is that it frees your calendar so that other people can book things in. If something is booked for an hour but it can be wrapped up in 30 mins.. that gives 30 mins breathing room.
If you havent already done so, go and change your entire organizations default meeting length to 30 minutes. Force people to justify why they need an hour. Still not sure why it isnt the default.