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Comment by jarl-ragnar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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