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Comment by nevon | Hacker News Reader

We operate in the same way in the company I work for, and while it's certainly an improvement over useless presentations, the silent reading being part of the meeting drives me insane. The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting now means that the rest of us have to sit around for 15 minutes twiddling our thumbs. Even if I purposefully ignore the material until the meeting itself, I typically finish reading in about half the time it takes the slowest reader. I almost wish meetings would have two different start times - one for people that want to do meeting prep during the meeting and one for people that do it at some other time, so that I can just join 15 minutes in when everyone is actually ready to start the meeting.

I complain, but again, overall I think it's an improvement over what came before and I wouldn't want to go back.

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> I almost wish meetings would have two different start times - one for people that want to do meeting prep during the meeting and one for people that do it at some other time, so that I can just join 15 minutes in when everyone is actually ready to start the meeting.

They do. Show up 15 minutes late, or bring your laptop and get work done while you wait.

The author implies that going to meetings later if you've already done the reading is an option at Amazon.

> If a document is provided early and I have a conflict at the begining of the meeting I can read the document ahead of time and join the meeting 10-20 minutes late without missing anything.

> The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting

If I wanted to manage my calendar in the way you suggest using my current calendar system it seems like I would manually allocate a block of "prep time" every time someone invites me to a meeting with prerequisites, correct?

If prep time is publicly blocked out then we may have to manually negotiate a suitable time because no one knows which blocks are prep and which are meetings. Alternately if prep time is not publicly visible then anyone can schedule over it then people need to start rejecting meetings after all blocks are filled by meetings or prep. In both cases everyone has to manually reshuffle prep time and potentially manually negotiate schedules which sounds like a lot of work for every new meeting.

In reality everywhere I've worked assumes that "prep time" is something that everyone handles in their own way. In practice that means some people mange to squeeze it in during normal business hours, some people do it the night before during their personal time, some people (usually the most important stakeholders) come with an apology that they haven't gotten to the material yet.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if calendaring tools better supported this use case (e.g. "reserve 30m up to a week before this meeting") but until then blocking out time during a meeting for reading seems very civilized.

I think this comment comes from a place of having plenty of unscheduled time before the meeting, but the format is really oriented around solving things for people with no unscheduled time.

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