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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, guidelines for effective meetings are rarely part of formal education or job training. Somewhere I saw a concise list of requirements that was something like:

1) Send out written agenda ahead of time

2) Every meeting should have some decision that is made

3) Everyone invited to the meeting should speak

4) Notes should be taken

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The framing of these rules really hide the ball and lend themselves to cargo culting.

Have a written agenda before the meeting BECAUSE you know exactly what it’s about when you are scheduling it and you want each participant to know their part. Don’t type up a thoughtless list the day before.

A decision should be made at the end BECAUSE the point of the meeting was to make that decision. Don’t add decision points where you didn’t appropriately set the stage.

Everyone invited should speak BECAUSE you should only come to the meeting if you are contributing. Don’t invite an irrelevant person and solicit their opinion.

Notes should be taken BECAUSE you are in a narrowly focused, important decision making moment and you want a record of how a choice was made. Don’t hold a worthless meeting and assign a note taker to capture useless information.

There are two types of meetings: ones where you come up with a decision/plan of action, and ones in which you pass down information. Make sure you know which type it is first. Your list then applies to the first type.

bingo. sometimes I need to brief people or be briefed by people.

in theory email or slack or whatever could do this, but people don't read emails, don't read them in a timely fashion, and are not always available for quick clarifications or questions.

for every one of you that's "this could be an email" there will be 3 of you that won't read it.

Even for the "pass down information" kind, running the meeting like a reverse classroom is more efficient. Read the new content outside of the meeting, discuss/process/problem-solve/etc in the meeting.

https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/active-colla...

My personal rule of thumb is, every single participant should have prepared for the meeting for at least the amount of time the meeting is booked for. If this isn't true, you have either an ineffective meeting or wrong/too many people in the room.

I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Thank you for sharing! I especially like point number 2. It reduces the amount of meetings I have SIGNIFICANTLY.

That rule does have a lot of potential for abuse if not used right. A common way is "the decision is that we need to have another meeting about this later".

The n.2 usually doesn't work like that.

We're talking about a meeting that wasn't a recurring event, so at least the person setting it up had an intention of getting something out of it. If there's no output, it's more productive to understand why it failed than to stick to or try to enforce a random guideline.

Perhaps there's just too many conflicting interests and someone has to take the lead. Perhaps nobody actually knew what was going on and the whole meeting was spent getting up to speed (funnily enough, prepared agendas often won't help for fundamental misunderstandings). Perhaps there was no output to expect in the first place and the person setting up the meeting lost their way.

You'll improve/reduce meetings by looking back at these failed attempts and act on the findings. If your team can't do that, they won't be in a position to properly understand and follow a guideline either IMHO.

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