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Comment by F-W-M | Hacker News Reader

Why do meetings start with dedicated reading time? Did people always come unprepared? How can I imagine this? Is it like: "Hey folks, thanks for showing up. This is the document we'll be discussing in 20min. Please read it now?".

I don't think it's bad. I like written, long form content. It just is very far from what I know.

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If there's a meeting and most, but not all, of the folks read the document, then there's the potential they'll have to wait while the others read the document. To avoid that eventuality, the convention is that no one reads the document until the meeting, and then there's no wasted time.

source: worked at Amazon and was told this by my boss

That's a pretty good idea, because reading the preparatory material for a decision is almost always valuable but often not explicitly valued. An employee might think they could be 'doing something better' with the time, but even the meekest worker can confidentially feel justified in reading a document if it has scheduled time in the published agenda. This levels the playing field between the overburdened and the lazy on one side and the well-prepared on the other.

From a personal point of view, however, I instinctively dislike the idea: trying to process and evaluate material in public is stressful, chiefly because it is so often in my experience presented in bad faith. The slightest expression of positivity is immediately twisted into unwavering enthusiasm and complete consent, and a hint of misunderstanding is used as justification to discard any further criticism! You have to really trust your colleagues to allow yourself to learn, be confused and risk making mistakes in their company. But if the workplace really does have that non-competitive culture, it is surely the most efficient way of conducting meetings, possibly the best combination of written preparation and live collaboration.

People are busy and often times will be aware of the broad strokes of the topic at hand, but not necessarily the latest details. A well written narrative will bring everyone back to the salient choices.

I've asked some friends at Amazon this and never quite got a satisfactory answer.

It feels really disrespectful to waste my time, when I've bothered reading the preparatory material, because X number of other attendees haven't. And, presumably, for Amazon to do this for every single meeting, it must have been commonplace for folks to not manage their time effectively to get prepared for the meetings they attend? Quite a bizarre approach.

"Quite a bizarre approach."

Or a pragmatic one. Also I imagine there are other positive side effects like preparing a focus for the topic at hand. And 5 minutes, or even shorter might be enough for most topics I think. Better than people pretending they know what is going on.

The optimal is for everyone not to do the reading, there’s time for it in the meeting. And in terms of time management, managers can be in back to back meetings for a large portion of the day and this provides focus time to not just wing it.

Wouldn't it be optimal to have read, understood and thought about it before the meeting? Although this probably never happens, except maybe if you go full async and request a thoughtful response from everybody before a meeting might happen.

Right I shouldn’t have said optimal, it’s the Nash equilibrium though.

Meetings at my company often are like this too.

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