Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings
execution.com
execution.com
- % of meetings per employees in time (i.e. are we more and more spending time in meetings since we are growing)
- automatic employees group diagram/relations computation based on meetings invites
- who's never in meetings (who's being solo)
- who's always in meetings
- % meetings without a clear agenda
- % of recurring meetings ("bad") vs one-offs (ok)
- meeting duration statistics
- external vs internal attendees
- anything else?
All of those company wide metrics would be gold for any execs willing to understand why are we slowing down on delivery or just having a clear overview of the organisation and how they collaborate.
Even for sales organisation this could be beneficial for tracking performance and suggesting strategies.
If I want to know if I am spending too much time in meetings, I just have to look at my calendar and own gut feeling. But if I want to know it for the whole company, I have not easy data point.
This startup had some meeting analytics tooling: https://medium.com/startup-grind/startup-mortality-what-end-.... But they stopped (maybe they should have focused ONLY on that).
If anyone would be interested to build ^, ping me at wouaren@gmail.com
We take privacy very seriously, none of your calendar data is stored, just tabulated, and as soon as we finish we remove the token so we can't access anything in the future. The ONLY thing we store is the tabulation and your email address (which is not made public) tied to that tabulation.
[Update] - We are only doing 1st party consent so I will email their support to find out what the heck is going on with it showing that.
When you click Customize, and manually turn off all options, the very next page you visit will show you the GDPR prompt again - and again. This definitely violates the consent statutes.
Please let your provider know so they can fix this bug, and on either their or your side, provide an option for a clear No button, or at the very least a quick way to disable all.
What's the best way I can get GDPR compliant? I know that GDPR isn't designed to crack down on products like mine, but I'm still legally required to comply. A simple notice saying user data isn't given to any third parties? I have a privacy policy, of course.
As for bragging about your privacy stance - well - that's a product design decision. Personally I'd probably do it on the "why you should use this" style pages and leave it out of any functional pages.
Consent to store data or share it with third parties? I store PII, but I don't share it with any third-party.
Best way to comply with GDPR is read it carefully and/or hire a lawyer.
Microsoft does not, so it will remain valid. We don't store it or log it anywhere, and the system that retrieves and processes data is not publicly accessible.
I know you have good intentions here, but I hope you are aware that you may unintentionally be storing it somewhere [1]. Not much you can do about it unless you keep actively searching for it everywhere.
[1] I strongly remember reading an article here on HN recently about some security breach stemming from writing production secrets in log files, but I can't find the link :/ If anyone else has it, can you post it?
On this topic, since I joined Microsoft this summer, one of the off-the-shelf tools I've been most impressed with is the MyAnalytics dashboard (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-analytics/myanaly...) built into Office online. I like that in addition to meetings, it also summarizes time spent on email and time spent working outside of "business hours" -- and decorates each stat with benchmarks to compare with company averages.
I also appreciate the claim that "Only you have access to your MyAnalytics dashboard. MyAnalytics does not provide your manager or anyone else in your organization access to your dashboard." (Of course if push comes to shove, this is all company data, but I like that it's only shown to me by policy.)
The reality was pretty terrible-- I felt like the entire company spent all day writing emails, going to meetings, and updating wikis... Which seemed pretty scary for a company that hadn't figured out its own product yet. We wanted a big chart showing the allocation of time spend so we could show it the exec team and say, "Is this on purpose?"
The company ended up raising $50M and selling for less than $1M. The founder went on to create Fab.com, which raised $300M+ and sold for $15M.
A similar thing which I'm interested in tracking is the impact of meetings on flow state. I wonder if it would be helpful to have a more nuanced way for "makers" to protect their flow state time than having to block out their calendar for hours / days at a time. I envisage a system where a meeting booker is able to make the decision - "Is the meeting important enough to curtail or split this person's flow state?".
Meetings first thing in the morning or at the end of the day are better in that regard.
However this experience could be due to me working working on a distributed team. When you're all in the location then it's easier to have ad hoc communication without interruption at places like the water cooler.
I wonder if simply by making the information available on when people are in flow state, a lot of flow state interruptions could be reduced, even without reducing the number of meetings. In particular, encouraging scheduling a meeting at the beginning / end of a flow state period rather than slap bang in the middle would have a big impact. For example, assume you want to work in flow from 10:00-12:30, scheduling a 15 minute meeting at 10:00 or 12:15 is preferable to scheduling one at 11:00, because you might still be able to get into flow for a couple of hours.
I'd like to see a scheduling system which dynamically encourages people to assign other meetings to an already compromised flow period to keep other flow periods free (rather than just blocking things out).
My worry is that without this, just focussing on minimal number of meetings / cost spent in meetings might not be enough. 3 badly scheduled 30 minute meetings might write off a whole day, whereas a single meeting of 1hr30 might have a much smaller impact, but on the raw "time spent in meetings" / "salary cost spent" metric these would seem equivalent.
Second, you can't just move meetings around, in my experience. Once something is scheduled, it calcifies; it's too much work coordinating time zones and schedules, and if you push something up, most people that were planning on it being later will be even more unprepared to discuss than usual.
I think the idea of being able to loosely schedule certain meetings (eg "Give me the least worst 30 minutes for the 3 people this week") could be an interesting thing to try. Having a system which knows whether it is advisable to 'bring forward' or 'push back' a meeting could be a big help. I also think that if a meeting is continually pushed back or brought forward, this might be interesting information in and of itself, especially for recurring meetings.
There could be downsides to this and I find it hard to even imagine what such a system would be like, given my current experience with Google Calendar, where even scheduling a meeting or room seems to be about 5 minute process.
In fact, on a previous job, this happened a couple of times. I was in flow, finishing something off or pairing and I would forget about my 1-1, showing up 15/30 mins late. I was always really embarrassed, but actually it didn't affect the manager too badly because they had other things to be getting on with.
My manager wanted a scheduler which satisfied the condition 'I would like to see all of my team members for at least 30 mins each on Wednesday', but they didn't mind who was seen when. In practice, these appointments were scheduled, by the manager, pretty much randomly I think, and fixed in advance, but something fluid could have worked.
Perhaps it is inevitable that all makers want meetings at the beginning / end of the day, but I'm not sure, especially when there are other meetings etc going on. Also, perhaps the short term rearrangement would be so disruptive or unsettling that it wouldn't be practical. My experience in some jobs has been that this was happening anyway with people frequently late to meetings, so they were defacto snoozed anyway.
As you say, if nothing else, such a system might surface some interesting data on which meetings were always missed / moved.
I like how they describe their usage and that they auto remove access. But even if I believe them, there are many errors that would expose hundreds of email, contact info, and docs.
I wish they had a scrubber utility I run and can remove unnecessary data. They should not need pii for their stats.
I know everything has to be an online web "app" these days, but the privacy concerns could be completely eliminated by simply making this an actual computer program.
The OP seams sincere and honest, but leaks happen on projects with multi-million dollar security teams/budgets.
And honestly, there is no reason to trust a service that uses dark patterns regarding tracking and personal data. If I were you I'd sort this out quickly and also re-evaluate why you are using a service that employs these dark patterns.
GDPR isn't setting some completely unrealistic standard, it is just the absolute bare minimum that you could possibly expect. If you don't want to uphold that and actively try to exploit your users for pennies, sure, go ahead. But most of the world would rather you stay offline.
People should be sick of unethical practices, not GDPR.
Also the changes in the industry are huge. Just because some sites have a hard time grasping the idea that the user isn't the enemy doesn't retract from the massive success that it is despite it being so new.
Just one example is the many places where you suddenly are able to downloading your data as well as delete it.
I would assume that meta-data and derived data is still going to be preserved. This looks like it's lead-gen for a future service they are building.
We did this for fun, as a proof of concept for a paid saas idea, and because it might be a good lead gen source down the road. Our hope is people can use this to show their boss the pain meeting madness is causing, and what is preventing them from making. :)
I can't really use it though, since I often schedule "heads-down" sessions for myself (ironically because of meeting overload). I hope a future version allows me to add a text filter rule of some kind to exclude them.
In the same vein, please consider generating stats for slack and other chat app usage as well. Would be very valuable to clearly see it's impact on roles primarily hired for building things.
I like what was said by rob-d about flow state. There's a lot of ancillary "stuff" attached to meetings - anticipation, preparation, transportation, decompression, etc. Add the actual time in-meeting, and you have a proper interruption.
Creating some variety of "meeting gravity," which would pull in, combine, or group other meetings contiguously would be welcome, particularly amongst those who are sensitive to interruptions in flow.
We also have some crazier ideas we are testing such as allowing teams/businesses to do things like: - Block entire days or blocks of time from allowing meetings. - Require an agenda/purpose to a meeting 24 hours ahead of time or killing the meeting. - Setting a max time for meetings and if someone makes one for over a threshold we split it into two meetings to change the psychology and trying to finish it quickly. - Emailing the creator of the meeting the real cost of inviting so many people and asking them to verify it has value to the organization. - Tools to allow management/teams to kill off meetings that don't meet their criteria. Such as killing off all recurring meetings that are not 1v1, or setting hard limits on what % of your time is spent in meetings per job title.
Basically a lot of ways to hard enforce good meeting culture... it might sound a bit draconian but I think we have all had the pain of being in a culture that doesn't know it has a meeting problem.
Angular.js Mandrill email API
I like it though. If nothing else, it's sad fun.
But, I wish I could correct the statistics.
* I haven't had this email for a year (doesn't extrapolate)
* My salary is much higher than $60k
* I work a 37.5 hour week
Also a way to combine meetings across my multiple email addresses would be icing on the cake.