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I have a much simpler way of dealing with meetings. If I'm sent a meeting request and there's no agenda or clear reason for my attendance I decline it.

A couple of months doing that in a new job, explaining the rational where necessary, usually sorts the problem out.

This is the crux of the problem. Is there an agenda that leads to a concrete result and is it the right set of participants? Too often, people turn a 10 minute meeting into an hour by just socializing or talking about things that only 2 people in the 10 care about or need to know. This is what annoys me about Slack's "we remove all meetings and email" approach. You can have no full meetings using Slack, instead you invite everyone to a channel and have 100 micro-meetings of a minute all day long that constantly interrupt your flow and could be solved easily with one short 15 minute meeting.

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.

> This is what annoys me about Slack's "we remove all meetings and email" approach. You can have no full meetings using Slack, instead you invite everyone to a channel and have 100 micro-meetings of a minute all day long that constantly interrupt your flow and could be solved easily with one short 15 minute meeting.

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.

This is simple if you are in a position of power within the organization. For most makers, this is not the case, so people end-up with meetings where most organizers belive are good and most participants believe are bad, BUT ALMOST NOBODY SPEAKS UP!

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.

I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives.

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'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives.

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...

I'm not sure why you raised your point, but unfortunately generalizing when a specific issue is raised is one of the problem things I see in meetings too.

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.

That is true that meeting productivity highly depends on meeting organizers. That role starts with figuring out if the meeting is needed, finding a time, inviting people who own the decision, etc. Not that many people good at it.

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?

I have tried to do some of that with a Slack bot project I'm working on, called Huxley: https://www.meethuxley.com/

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...

Happy to hear that there are other companies solving the same problem!

We are working on Slack integration too, it will be possible to create & schedule Meetter topics right from Slack or from Teams.

Note: Meetter has built-in video meeting experience with recording & transcribe by default. You will see ‘Join Now’ button on the agenda about 5 minutes before the Meetter hour starts.

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

This is a really unique solution; nice work. Do you have any thoughts on how this would work across timezones (our team is spread across 9 hours)?

Thanks for the feedback! If you have at least one hour of overlap - then you can just use that daily hour for Meetter. That is what we do within our team.

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.

Company meetings are not about the tech or tools you can throw at them. It is about the culture. Some companies understand that and minimize their meetings and solely depend on project management systems.

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.

Thanks for your suggestion on landing page!

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.

Have you experienced these yourself or seen it from outside (like a tech consultant)?

Yes, I have personally struggled a lot. About 5+ years of experience working in a highly distributed company where meetings for me and many colleagues take more than 50% of the time. There a lot of advice out there on how to improve things, but it takes time to master. The other problem is that it is not something that only you need to learn, all your peers have to and that takes time. There are also limits to what you can do with existing technology.

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.

Well then, you should include a case study like yours because it would be far more effective than a short video.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Feature request for way, way down the line: auto-integrating product work into daily/weekly standup meeting invites.

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.

Thanks for bringing this up! One thing that we are not yet sure how much value the concept of daily/weekly standing meetings will add to the teams using Meetter for most of their meetings.

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"

Oh I agree, but we do need to discuss blockers relatively quickly after they come up, and stand-ups can be an efficient way to do this. You can try to just automate workflows or try to get people to resolve blockers asynchronously, but if it takes more than a couple replies to resolve them, now a meeting may have been faster/more efficient.

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 :-)

Ah, I see what you are suggesting. This indeed makes sense and may be possible not so far down the road when we expose APIs.

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.

Interesting. I have a bunch of private notes on the subject from when I was last playing with startup ideas. The biggest hurdle I kept hitting was differentiating the startup within the calendar space, because it is a pretty well saturated space with a lot of entrenched players. (Similarly as bad as the Mail space, if not worse, just as we've seen several apps exit these past couple of weeks. Though some of those efforts have exited well for the startup founders, so that's an issue more for the overly conservative "local" VCs I was curious if I could get to invest, when I was putting my notes together…)

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?

This is so true. Looking at recent developments in calendar software - it is almost all about generating more meetings easier, and not much about protecting from the distraction. Meeting software companies - pricing models tiered based on duration and size of the meetings. So it will require 180 degree u-turn for them to catch up.

Neat! I’ve wanted something like this to use at Sourcegraph. We would like to be able to say “Alice and Bob, you two should chat about XYZ for 15 min sometime in the next week” and have some piece of software aggregate and schedule all those things. How much of that can Meetter do?

Great suggestion! We never thought about such a use case so as of now by default you will be also added to that meeting, but we can easily tweak it.

So Meetter can do alomost everything you described. I will let you know when we have tweaked it.

Looking forward to it!

Give it a try: https://i.gyazo.com/d848d0bcdedcb4046b644613efbc95ed.gif

Hi All,

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

Is the name an abbreviation of Meet-eater?

Love it! :-)

Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings