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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> but in having useless and inconsequential meetings.

only know to be useless after having had the meeting, and the decisions or discussion were either moot, already known, or completely expected.

So how do you know whether a meeting is required, before organizing and/or attending one?

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A few tricks that can catch meeting that a more or less guaranteed to be useless (in IT):

* Does it have less than 10 people attending?

* It there an here an agenda?

* Is there more technical people than managers?

* Do you know why you've been asked to attend?

If you can answer "No" to any of those questions, you're going to have a bad time. Now you can have meetings where you answer yes to all of the above, and it's still useless, but the chances are lower.

Don't you mean more than 10?

A meeting with more than 10 people tends to waste more people's time than a meeting with less than 10.

I think only the first and last are really important. I've had very effective meetings where I was the only technical person and we didn't have a formal agenda. Often meetings with stakeholders where I wanted to know what I could do for them; what they needed. So I guess that's still an agenda, but more important is that I was in control and the meeting was small.

Being a bystander in a big meeting, that is the worst. If it doesn't affect me and my input is not needed, why am I there?

One rubric I use is "is there one or more questions to be decided on in this meeting?" If no, it's a pointless meeting.

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