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Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

25 minutes and everything starts at either XX:05 or XX:35.

People get to be human and do things like use the restroom, get a drink, or just take a breath in between meetings without being flustered and apologizing for being late.

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I just sprinkle short events that show me as “busy” and start at odd offsets like :15 and :45 so I can have some blocks of time where I get to take a break from meetings and do some of the work that stems from those meetings (otherwise when the hell do I do the work). The weird offsets really confuse calendaring applications :) which always try to align things to :30 or :00.

Just block off times as “reserved” for work, and unapologetically so.

Last time I did that, a PM just ignored it.

Then you just say “no” to the meeting and don’t attend :)

Exactly. Make your own schedule, or others will make it for you.

The anecdote said that they did make their own schedule but then someone made it for them anyway.

It sounds like they attempted to make their own schedule, but then acquiesced when faced with an inconsiderate ask.

On the other hand, I may have way fewer meetings than many others that might get invited to the same meetings, so I understand it can be hard to find a time where everyone is available.

I've only been to one company that had a sane meeting culture. Along with every meeting invitation there were attached documents that you were expected to read. You were expected to have notes and comments ready. The meetings mostly were not supposed to be a time where you worked vague things out.

Not being able to meet in person we relaxed this rule to encourage more "shooting the shit" and team bonding time focusing more on vague stuff.

Specifics are already easy to discuss async.

In my last few jobs, there has been the option to set a meeting to private. It shows on your calendar but people can’t see the title or other details. You could create multiple shorter events if you think people would be suspicious of a single multi-hour meeting.

M doesn't stand for manager, it stands for assistant.

I do that and keep my calendar private so people can't see they're productivity blockers. If something's important, people will ask me if I can free up a slot for them. If it isn't important they usually don't bother asking, which is just as well.

I do this. Works really well.

I value transparency as a leader, and so I keep my calendar public and encourage my teams to do so as well. However, sometimes I'll just block off some time with the word "busy" as the title. It looks like it's a private event, but it's really just me taking some time for myself. People will assume that someone just made a private meeting with me. You get the benefit of both sides that way. It's worked well for me in the past.

Just sharing my POV. You do you. :)

The sentiment and logic here is good but I think all employees have to agree otherwise wastes some time for those folks who do show up on time.

My personal observation is the timing matters less than the number of participants. More people usually equals less insights and more wasted time. One rule could be "if you can't emerge with an action item you shouldn't be here." But I'm not sure if that's practical as an organization grows and social/political relationships matter more.

Not everyone takes an action item out of the meeting. Some people provide information to the meeting. But if you're not contributing or taking something away, you should go, yes.

At MIT, all classes started 5 minutes after the scheduled time and ended 5 minutes before the scheduled time.

Something like that is fairly normal at universities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...:

“An academic quarter (localized into various languages in the countries where it is practiced[a]) is the quarter-hour (15 minute) discrepancy between the defined start time for a lecture or lesson ("per schema") and the actual starting time, at some universities in Europe including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the United States.”

This was applied in 100% of classes at my university in Sweden. A 14-16 lecture would start at 14:15, take a break from 15-15:15 and end at 16. The practice was frequently applied in student union meetings and events.

While in France they d start on time but the students would trickle down for 15 minutes. You can imagine our respective surprise when I had a german boss one day and I d arrive always 2 minutes late not understanding why it would be written on the meeting note as if it was a huge mega deal :D

Complete disrespect for him, absolutely the norm for me :D He learned to be less angry and I learned to be less "late"

This is so common... and a few kind words in the beginning would avoid any negative effect once and for all. Yet its so hard for so many folks

Same.

However, while meetings were sometimes explicitly scheduled for a quarter past, if your thesis supervisor schedules a meeting at, e.g., 9 AM, then be sure not to show up at 9:15. :)

UofT (University of Toronto) does 10 minutes.

It works really well, except for non-classes no one is ever sure if you were told UofT-time or normal-time. For example if you agree to meet with a prof or ta outside of class..

I think I would have preferred if they just always scheduled things at "xx:10 to yy:00" instead of having the ":10" as implicit.

This is actually called Michigan Time

I think at many (most?) universities, an “hour” of tuition is officially recognized as 50 minutes.

I don't even apologize for being late anymore.

I’ve seen early endings but not late starts. That seems way better.

Everyone ignores early endings, late starts is so much better!

I try to schedule them at 20 minutes, so that people have 10 minutes to prepare for the next meeting. If I'm on point that's usually enough.

A lot of these organizations put status updates as meetings though, which is never necessary. There are a lot of better ways to send status updates.

Or spend 25 minutes fiddling with Zoom sound settings which somehow don't work with the random headset they just picked up 2 mins before the meeting.

Or just cancel almost all meetings and do async communication. Works great.

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