I’d pay extra to have my meetings capped to half an hour.
The secretary made sure to keep the discussion on-topic and that we stuck to the times. If an item needed more discussion, we'd either have a breakout meeting or add it to the agenda of the next meeting (in the front of the queue).
This made meetings almost enjoyable, and is still the best meeting experience I've ever had.
Obviously the second has its exceptions, but for the general meeting where everyone is present, a question should be confined to something relevant to everyone at the meeting. Instead, what some people here is, "What would you personally like me to discuss with you?"
Possible responses: "That is beyond the scope of this meeting." "Let's take this offline."
"You need to talk to Dave." - bonus if Dave knows nothing about it - double bonus if Dave does not exist
Its funny, as this advice is the opposite of the advice we got when doing engineering onboarding at Google in 2013. They told us that if we have a question in a meeting, go ahead and ask it. The reasoning is that its likely that many other people have the same question and will benefit from the answer, but were too shy to ask it themselves.
Different target audiences, I guess :)
I'd expect almost everything said in "engineering onboarding" to be equally relevant for all of an homogeneous group of new recruits who have the same questions and varying ideas about their importance and obviousness.
On the other hand a meeting in the Marines is likely to be about the respective orders and status reports of several people, with everybody having different problems that should be discussed individually.
We have this issue a lot with our standups.
The wording we've agreed on is "can I talk to anyone later about xxx?"
Where you agree to take something offline, but don't necessarily who to talk to it about or if it's appropriate to the whole group.
It's actually pretty weird thinking about how much time effort and sweat that was put in into coming up with those exact words.
AI (in Samuel L. Jackson's voice): "Legacy code motherf****r"
This could be awesome.