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Comment by dammitcoetzee | Hacker News Reader

There are sections of this that overlap with how I treat meetings, but overall it seems like a bunch of verbal fluff that's the opposite of what a meeting should be. Exceedingly clear, short, and purposeful.

I learned a more pragmatic, even meeting-hostile approach to meetings: http://hackaday.com/2016/10/06/life-on-contract-how-to-have-...

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The hackaday article is close, but not complete.

  1. The Problem, communicated in advance, understood by all parties
  2. The Exit Condition
  3. Time Boxed
  4. The Actionable tasks, when they will be done, who they are communicated to

When the exit condition is satisfied, the meeting is over. If the time allotted to the box goes over, the meeting is over. Once the exit condition is satisfied, tasks are allotted with clear timelines and points of contact. The meeting is run by _someone_, that person gets consensus when the exit criteria is met and is often the point of contact for the follow up tasks. The person running the meeting does research and communicates that research to the attendees. Any attendee not familiar with the research before the meeting starts is asked to leave. If it is determined that something is unknown and needs more research, those tasks are handed out and the meeting is reconvened at a later date. The meeting date is scheduled immediately.

This needs to be written up into a cheatsheet.

"Time Boxed" needs to mean boxed on both ends. If a meeting is scheduled to start at 2:00, it starts at 2:00. Not 2:05, not when the last person wanders in, and not when the organizer figures out how to run the projector. The implied task there is that any setup should be done prior to the start time.

Nothing is more frustrating than company cultures which allow the "meetings never start on time, so I'll show up late" / "not everyone is here on time so I'll wait a few more minutes" death spiral. It's like a game of chicken to see who thinks their time is more valuable than everyone else's.

This is a much more difficult problem at large companies where meeting rooms can be a scarce resource, and other meetings that run long can negatively impact yours.

Having a plan for the meeting and having everybody trying to keep the meeting short helps a lot. I think if you're in a place where you need to write ground rules for meeting there's a larger cultural problem that needs to be addressed.

I couldn't agree more. At my company, we have a few thousand employees spread across 2 main locations in the same city and 25 smaller offices. BUT we only have 12 full sized conference rooms and 4 that only seat 5. So we end up scheduling meetings more around conference room availability than person availability, and then we have people having to walk/bike/cab/uber a mile (or more) from another location to get to this meeting on time.

Scheduling meetings around employees (especially management), vendors and conference rooms is one of the biggest challenges we face for meeting times.

Try Sococo - virtual conference rooms. I swear, its better than everybody sitting in a physical room. You can see, hear, share docs, chat, form subgroups and regroup fluidly.

Caveat: I own stock (used to work there)

We have this through various other tools, but it will never kill off the need for face to face communications. Drawing on the white board, throwing markers at each other, two people presenting ideas at the same time.

This is especially difficult during technical integration meetings, where you are tossing around ideas left and right.

Sococo does all but the 'throwing markers' part.

Our meetings always start late but always end right on time. Either somebody rambles for half an hour to fill the time or the meeting closes in the middle of finding a solution.

There's little to no fluff in that article. ("Long" is not the same thing as "full of fluff".) He's simply analyzing a somewhat complex and very abstract topic -- how to run meetings in general. There are a lot of possible cases and exceptions that can come up in that structure, and he goes into detail about all of them.

Not every topic can be covered adequately in a pithy aphorism that fits into 140 characters or less. Attempting to jam such a complex topic as "running meetings" into a short format just for the sake of being short would not work. There are too many exceptions and contingencies. If they are ignored, the article would not be not a useful guide to "meetings" in general.

That sounds like a lot of verbal fluff. I learned a more pragmatic, even posting-hostile approach to posting:

1. Post message

2. Get upvotes

Not billing for meeting time? Amateur :P

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