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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

The premise here is that meetings are chock-full of valuable and dense information. This is not true. Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time.

There are also various linguistic theories that argue that actual information density (in spoken/written language) is significantly less than 95%. So the corollary here is that remembering 95% of a meeting is a waste of cognitive capacity. The better strategy would be to bullet-point and solely remember the most salient and important information. The author's efforts seem like an interesting "memory game," but there are better methods[1] for learning how to remember stuff, if, for whatever reason, that's your end goal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi

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> Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time.

Exactly why notes should be taken and disseminated.

Without going to the lengths tchalla describes, simply stating meeting duration and number of people in attendance, and listing decisions made and expectations raised for deliverables will over time reduce the frequency and duration of meetings and make them more focused and effective.

Simply seeing repeated examples of "the meeting took 1 hour 30 min with 7 people attending. We decided: - to use mid gray instead of slate gray for menu bar sub-elements" will eventually cause people to wonder, "why did that take so long?", while serving as a written record of decisions for those whose memories are shaky at 9AM Friday, and new team members.

If you want to be a hard-ass, just multiply out the duration and number attending: "the meeting took 10.5 person-hours".

> If you want to be a hard-ass, just multiply out the duration and number attending: "the meeting took 10.5 person-hours".

Then multiply by the average compensation to get the cost of the meeting

But keeping a note of the decision(s) taken is useful, especially in case of later disagreement.

I think there is a big difference between a meeting with one other person - as the author describes - and a corporate meeting of 3 project managers, 2 business analysts, an enterprise architect and 3 engineers who didn't think to reject the meeting they absolutely didn't need to be at.

Meeting 1:1 you range all over, I often have meetings with people that go from work, to our kids, to the weekend, to work, back to the kids and then to the pub. All of it is valuable, but not all of it is valuable for work. But a year later when I remember it was that person's eldest's birthday I've made a solid connection.

Equally important is that not every brain works the same way, I'd be completely screwed trying to use Vasili's method as I have aphantasia. But that doesn't mean others wouldn't find it useful.

"All of it is valuable, but not all of it is valuable for work."

^ you could make the argument that almost all of it is valuable for work. The connections you make with other people, even on things that do not relate to work, can have a huge impact on your relationship in the workplace. Even the stuff that just seems like nonsense, joking around, crazy dicussions about things that don't really matter much, etc -- sharing those things can be part of building friendship and trust, and that can be of great value for work.

Of course, sometimes such things can have a negative effect, depending on the person you are meeting with. So you need to be aware of that.

Some people are particularly good at building relationships this way.

> But a year later when I remember it was that person's eldest's birthday I've made a solid connection.

Everyone is different, and I applaud you for the effort involved, but I have to confess:

This sort of thing mostly creeps me out. There's no way you remembered it organically, which means that you spent the conversation with me trying to identify items of personal interest that you could record and replay for some kind of social benefit/bonding.

My advice, and this might be what you do already, is to make sure a) the _thing_ is important enough to remember on its own, and b) your "memory" is vague enough that I don't think you're CRMing me.

E.g.:

BAD: Hey it's your wife's birthday on Thursday isn't it? Wish her a happy 34th from us!

OK: Hey your wife has an autumn birthday, doesn't she? I remember we talked about it last year around this time. Wish her a happy one!

GOOD: Oh that's right, we talked about that last year. My wife has an autumn birthday too. Wish her a happy one!

That's certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that the above OP was just being thoughtful.

Recording and replaying opportunities to appear thoughtful, is not thoughtful.

It's merely artifice for the purpose of appearing thoughtful, which I find creepy.

But as I note in my initial comment: everyone is different.

Paper, and now computers, are one of the best ways we have learned to augment the human mind.

Is it creepy for someone to (with their brain alone) remember a personal detail like a birthday? If not, it shouldn't be creepy to remember it with an augmented brain.

There is a fuzziness here when your brain is augmented with information that you didn't have original access to, such as a shared calendar with birthdays on it, but I'm not sure how creepy using that information is - it almost certainly comes down to expectations of privacy with respect to that information.

As I attempted to express in my initial comment, I find it creepy when the details which are remembered exceed the level of expectation for the relationship between the people.

Remembering my birthday? Well, I know you wrote it down (or in OP case, it's in the HR file), but we have a relationship that is formalized around paperwork. So OK, whatevs.

Remembering my oldest child's birthday? There is no way in hell you remembered that organically. So I'm led to suspect that you made an active effort to log the detail for future use. And I have to envision you, listening to me casually discuss family ephemera, taking notes of items that might have some future value.

That's creepy, IMO. But I can accept that different people view it differently.

Nevertheless, if your goal is to create a connection between yourself and another person (as indicated in OP comment) -- you will not succeed if you fail to understand your audience. This is the idea I was attempting to express to OP.

The other person may choose to overlook your offensiveness, but they will not think more highly of you after the fact, than before. For certain definitions of "other person". Do with that what you will.

I take notes and for dates I think are important I put them in my calendar, but I also remember numbers easily so dates aren't a challenge for me. I have Aphantasia & Prosopagnosia so I don't waste a lot of brain space remembering what people look like :D (Or names for that matter, I'm terrible at names).

Seriously though, I would walk past that same co-worker in a shop out of context and not recognise them at all.

Context is always important, I don't just randomly trot out dates because I can. I've never once had a person react negatively to me doing this. Its not like I see you for the first time in a year at a BBQ and the first thing I do is look up in my CRM my notes from the last time we met. I'm not wearing Google Glasses to tell me your name, DOB and family details. I met a former colleague a few months ago randomly in the street, had a quick chat and went our separate ways. Ten minutes later I looked at my calendar and realised it was his birthday; I didn't run after him to wish him a happy birthday, but you can be sure next year I'll remember his birthday without my calendar because of that day.

I recognise some people might be offended, but my own experience and most of the literature I've read around establishing rapport, building emotional connections etc all point to people really liking it when you talk about them. So I will continue to use my method until evidence points me to someone else. I know I risk alienating people such as yourself but overall I feel I have better friendships and working relationships. I just hope if I make someone uncomfortable that they'll let me know, just as you did.

If I understand your argument, you think that:

(1) there is no way an acquaintance would remember your child's birthday organically,

(2) so if they do remember they have taken actions to remember,

(3) and the reason they took those actions was in order to give the appearance of caring about the relationship between you both.

(4) Furthermore, everybody on the receiving end of this interaction finds it distasteful or offensive, or at least will not think more highly of you because of it.

I think that (some of) these points may hold for some people, but don't hold in general.

1. For whatever reason, there are people who will remember things like this.

2. There are also people who may remember something like this in one situation, but not in general. For example, it just so happens that my wife's brother has the same birthday! We went out for his birthday last night, which prompts me to remember this detail about your child. So when I meet you soonafter, I ask "how did <eldest child> enjoy their birthday?"

3. The important part of this is the 'appearance of caring', I think. Is it weird for a presenter at a workshop to use memorisation techniques to remember the participants names? Is it weird to make flash cards about people you met from a networking event to memorise who they are and what they do? There is a really blurry line between the 'appearance of caring' and 'actually caring' and I'm not sure there is much of a meaningful distinction.

4. I'm part of a large family conversation online. Many of the posts are birthday wishes, often from people you might see once a year. The first post is often from one aunt in particular, who has obviously collated a list of the birthdays for the ~50 people in the chat. No-one thinks this is creepy, and everyone loves that she has gone to the extra effort to remember their birthdays. Posting birthday wishes to an old college acquaintance because facebook reminded you isn't creepy, but also isn't viewed as fondly becuase less effort is required. I think it's reasonable to imagine many people would be flattered that someone went to the trouble to remember personal details.

I hear your point though, and agree that it could be creepy - it really is about understanding your audience, as you say, however I think it is more likely to be appreciated than not.

> Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time

Let's assume your premise is true. What can we do to change this situation? Here are a few things which have helped me

1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting

2. Define Agenda

3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome, Duration, Time

4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to own the topic and drive it

5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expected Outcome beforehand. Broadly, there could be three outcomes - Information, Discussion or Decision

6. Moderator should keep a strict check on Time. Sometimes, if there's a overshoot - the moderator should either ask for team agreement to continue the topic for a limited time (10 min - for example) until the Expected Outcome is reached. If not, stop the meeting and move on the the next item on the Agenda.

Yes, all this is a lot of work. But this fruitful work can reduce the total number of meetings to 5-10% of your total work time.

> Yes, all this is a lot of work. But this fruitful work can reduce the total number of meetings to 5-10% of your total work time.

I totally agree, but I'm usually not in a position to change the culture around meetings, nor do I get paid enough to be motivated enough to do it. If I ran my own company, the story would, of course, be different.

> I'm usually not in a position to change the culture around meetings, nor do I get paid enough to be motivated enough to do it.

I can totally understand you can not change culture around meetings in the entire organisation. I would like to offer two perspectives.

First, you could however change the micro-culture in most meetings which you are a participant. For example, "Hey! Thanks for the invite. What are the objectives for the meeting? It will help decide my participation for contribution". Second, if you are not paid enough, it is even the perfect reason todo so. It can buy back more time for yourself by reducing meetings! Overall, you basically do X for yourself and have more control over your work time. So, if you do not want to do it for the organisation - do it for yourself.

> Overall, you basically do X for yourself and have more control over your work time.

The company has control of my work time by definition -- they pay me for my time. How it chooses to use the time I give them is the company's prerogative, not mine. I really don't care one way or another if it's cool with me sifting through Instagram for an hour while someone talks about a bunch of nonsense.

Your time is the most valuable thing you have. My unsolicited advice is that you exert as much influence as you possibly can over how it is spent.

You're totally right, and I should have clarified that the process I describe is for long informal conversations with thought partners, focused primarily on exploring interesting ideas.

I wholeheartedly agree that most meetings are a waste of time.

In fact, a decade ago I made a very simple game for Windows Phone as it was launching called Meetingz, where you clicked on buzz words that you heard during a meeting to avoid going insane (while looking productive). After the meeting, it tabulated your BS index and compared the results to previous meetings.

During its short lifetime, the app had over 11,000 downloads: http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/killercodingninjamon...

Clicking on a phone looks productive? I'm surprised, I thought it would make you look distracted and inattentive.

> This is not true. Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time.

Obviously, this depends on the company and the team. If your department or team is having superfluous meetings then clearly you need to address the elephant in the room before trying to optimize memorization.

I’ve worked at companies that you describe and it is, indeed, miserable. However, once I moved to companies that took meeting discipline seriously (30 minutes max with few exceptions, agenda must be agreed upon ahead of time, people were expected to dismiss themselves from meetings that weren’t relevant) the value of well-run meetings became obvious.

Fix the core problems first, then optimize. There are plenty of books, blogs, and articles about how to run proper meetings. If your company is the type that thrives on inefficient meetings and wasting time, you may have to ask your manager to step in and handle meetings for you so you can focus.

He's talking about a different kind of meeting. A human encounter where you discuss and engage freely with another person.

I have similar doubts, but only thinking of the kind of work meetings I regularly have.

I think something like a non-technical interview "meeting" has a much higher information density.

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