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Comment by vertak | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the most succinct ruminations on meetings and I agree with almost every point. Meetings are obviously useful, but they are difficult because there are many ways to do meeting poorly and few know what steps they need to take to ensure meetings are good.

I’ve often thought that attaching a price to meetings would help prompt the question of why this meeting is worth $X of the company’s dime. At the very least it would decrease needless invitees and give some ammunition to the call for higher value meetings.

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In Japan, I’ve heard you have to pay out of your cost center to reserve conference rooms and it helps with this, and with not having people needlessly occupy conference rooms. It’s a win win.

Not only in Japan. I know of at least one big, US based multinational that does exactly that.

There meeting rooms are also tied to the attendees, so that only they can open the door. Disruption goes way down when others can't just grab something from an occupied meeting room.

Alternatively you can have only standing meetings. That usually helps reduce wasted time and stay succinct and effective from my experience.

I once worked for a team that dropped that practice to not force lesser bodily abled to acknowledge that they have a problem.

The 'they have a problem' might need to be expanded upon. Are we talking health issues related to weight, age, pregnancy, or other factors? Some of those are illegal to discriminate upon.

I wish I could say that was my experience. I had a daily scrum meeting for about a year that had at least 15 people, and everyone would take their turn to talk about each post-it note on the board. After standing for about half an hour, it gets really old. Nobody cared what anyone else was saying other than the one manager. When we tried to break it up, the manager said it was more efficient if we were all there at the same time. It might have even been true - for him.

Just think of such meeting as a paid break: check your phone for emails, catch up with Facebook friends, order some things from Amazon, or just let your mind wander. This way no meeting would be "a waste of time" :)

Personally, I've been working as contractor/consultant for the last 8 years, getting paid by the hour worked, so I grew to like those pointless meetings, because they simply are easy money: they count as work, but require almost no effort on my side.

>Just think of such meeting as a paid break

If you are paid salary and having to work any overtime, then it is likely taking up productive time and resulting in more unpaid overtime. If you are hourly, then I think that mentality works fine. I wonder if the different incentives every cause a problem in work places with both types of workers.

I think you discount the social signaling that goes on at these daily meetings, which I swear is the point of most of them.

If you're not paying attention, bosses will think less of you. So not only do you have to pretend to pay attention they love when you ask lots of gotcha questions to the person trying to give status. Anything to look smart.

A standing meeting is one that recurs on schedule. A standup meeting is one where participants stand

But often solving the problem is worth more than $X to the company. It's just that the people running the meeting don't know how to actually achieve their goals.

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