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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

The solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.

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Heh some people are on time, some people are late. It's seemingly a culture thing, and neither side understands the other. You say "of course nobody will stop at 9:50am" and that is exactly what I would do.

> neither side understands the other.

Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.

Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.

I think to some extent some of the pushback is the prompt folks not understanding that sometimes lateness isn’t something they can control (e.g., meeting with important set of stakeholders that you can’t duck out on early ran late)

There are unavoidable life obstacles, but some people are always late to everything.

Yea, I meant the habitually late.

I think people on both sides need to have more empathy, then. I'm generally one of the prompt people, and I'll try to start on time. If people are late, they'll arrive after we start, but that's fine.

And the late people need to understand that sometimes they will miss the beginnings of things, but that's ok too; their inability to be on time (for whatever reason) should not waste the time of those who get there on time.

My experience is that when you have habitually late people will enter a meeting after you start, their first question is, "what did I miss?"

So then you waste even more time when someone recaps for them.

It's almost like people need to think about their day when they're scheduling things instead of just accepting every single meeting.

You can request different times for things. That's an option.

Yes. And even as someone who tries to live by the ethos "if you're on time, you're late", I wind up late sometimes. It stresses me out, but hey sometimes shit happens.

But there are people where shit seems to happen more than for others. Late once in a blue moon? No worries. Repeat offender? That's a you problem.

Not everywhere is like wherever you are.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-11-tr-insid...

Non-punctual cultures can view on-time people as clueless, over-eager, and annoying.

The exact opposite can also be true, so not much is being said here. Try being late to a meeting in Germany or Japan. It is disrespectful.

Are there any highly developed countries where the business culture is still "non-punctual"? I struggle to think of any. In short, if you have two businesses side-by-side, and one operates more punctually, then it will probably out-compete the other. To be clear, I'm not talking about social culture. Yes, Italians might be late by an hour to go to dinner with friends, but I doubt people in Milan will be so late to a sales meeting with client.

Well, business cultures are social cultures. Firing off angry emails because somebody is “late” in Madrid won’t land you suppliers, resellers, contracts, or corporate customers.

FWIW I am personally a very punctual person with heritage from one of the most punctual countries. But when in Rome…

In my experience the people who are late are usually senior or exec types who arrive late with a lot of bluster and comments about how busy they are and then "Ok where are we?" like they are taking over the meeting.

In my experience, being on time isn't viewed as rude, but it is viewed as a nuisance, reflecting poorly on other people.

I had a Chinese tutor who got pretty upset that I would show up to lessons before she got there. Her first approach was to assure me that it was ok if I showed up later. Eventually she responded by showing up very, very early.

In a different case, I had an appointment to meet a friend, and she texted me beforehand to ask whether I'd left home yet. Since the appointment was quite some distance from my home, and I couldn't predict the travel time, I had already arrived, but upon learning that my friend dropped everything to show up early... and asked me why I was so early. I don't see a problem with waiting for a scheduled appointment if I show up early! But apparently other people do?

Presumably the tutor was being paid. If you arrive late, you are cheating yourself of your full time slot. Unless the tutor operated on a model of, “45 minutes starting whenever we are both here”.

> Unless the tutor operated on a model of, “45 minutes starting whenever we are both here”.

I would be unsurprised if that's how she thought about it, but it didn't really come up.

My sense was that, since she was the service provider and I was the customer, she felt that it was inappropriate for me to be waiting for her.

I love how true this article resonated to me, since it's very similar to Spain (but now I live in the polar opposite, Japan, where I am supposed to be at least 15 mins early):

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-brazilians-a...

I view people who show up too early as rude, as do many others.

The beautiful thing about being an early bird is you don't need to "show up too early". You just hang out until you're exactly on time and then show up. There is no analogue for the late person.

I don't get why you are getting downvoted

If an interviewee is half an hour early to a meeting that is rude if they actually expect to start now instead of the scheduled time

> if they actually expect to start now

That's the meat of it. If I'm going to a meeting where consequences of lateness would suck, like a job interview or something else where it would be highly rude to be late, I'll get there early. Then I'll hang out and play with my phone or something until the person's ready to meet with me at our scheduled time.

I also make it clear that I know I'm early and don't expect the other person to be ready for me. I might use a friendly, stock phrase like "I'd rather wait for them than have them waiting for me" to emphasize that I'm perfectly fine entertaining myself while they're getting ready to see me.

But ultimately, I treat it like getting to my gate at an airport. If I'm there early with time to kill, then so be it. That's infinitely preferable to arriving late and suffering the consequences.

What does being early have to do with the other? Just because I don't know trafficor other unknowns, and leave my house early, and go into the building to get some water or something; that does not mean I expect anything except the appointment to be on time.

That's a tough one. I lived in Toronto for many years and traffic and public transportation are unpredictably - it could take me an hour or it could take me three hours. Sure, if I was early a there was coffee shop near by that's an option. So I like to have a little compassion for people, especially working people.

    > I lived in Toronto for many years and traffic and public transportation are unpredictably - it could take me an hour or it could take me three hours.

Honestly, I find this hard to believe. A huge amount of the world (think all of retail and factories) operates on shifts. How could a place be and stay wealthy if transport times were so wildly unpredictable? It doesn't make sense. And, I write this assuming that Toronto is the wealthiest city in Canada.

It's considered at least weird to show up to some parties exactly on time, yes.

> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

No. Not for meetings. What is perceived as rude is making a big deal about it. You think it's a major social faux-pas, they think it's a "meh", and if you make a big deal about it and get offended now you're just being rude for no reason at all.

For personal and informal meetings, yes, being "on time" may mean annoying the host a bit. Why? Because when they say the party starts at 6pm, everyone should understand it as they should start showing up no earlier than 6:30pm etc.

I am not saying I agree or take side with any of these, just presenting it as both sides see it.

I was accused of not having enough to do by a boss. He was habitually late to everything. I am at every meeting 3 to 5 minutes early, because I leave every meeting at the :20 or :50 depending. Then I have 5 minutes to pee or whatever before going to the next one.

Either way, he saw me get to meetings a few minutes early and legitimately accused me of not having enough to do.

That was one of two jobs that I've ever walked out of.

Probably not, but they'll roll their eyes at ya when they show up.

Unfortunately that isn't the solution. As the article correctly notes, meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out. This is a universal truth in office buildings.

> meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out.

The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.

I've worked mostly remotely, and in companies where management insists on having visibility into subordinates' calendars. So I've placed an awful lot of official sounding decoy meetings on my calendar right after meetings that were completely unnecessary (could easily have been an email), hut where management would certainly listen to themselves talk past the buzzer.

My department head made a point once to instruct us that, if you need it, you should schedule time on your calendar as a meeting to just be "heads down" on work.

We have a lot of meetings so he encourages we do basically whatever it takes to keep meetings timeboxed.

I once was in an incident call where one of the execs was brought in and eventually said "We have 20 people in this call who all have good salaries. It will cost $600 to just inform our customer service agents to take care of this. Let's get out of here"

Management has to push that culture downwards, and reinforce it themselves, and continually encourage it as people join and leave and teams change.

I always felt this was wholly ineffective coming from someone who wasn’t contributing or necessary to any given meeting, but it’s important to establish and hold boundaries like this.

Even more points when a participant speaks up at the very beginning, to announce, “I’ve got a hard-stop at 9:50, so I’ll need to leave at that point no matter what.” Then the responsibility for wrap-up is placed squarely on leadership.

Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.

If you're not needed at the meeting, probably best not to be there in the first place.

This is one of those things that's hard to measure.

Quite often I'd have to sit thru meetings that 99% of the time I'm not needed but for one specific minute I keep someone else from making an expensive time wasting mistake. It can be very difficult to determine what you're actually needed for in IT/Operations stuff.

Someone who is neither contributing nor necessary to a meeting may still be required to attend the meeting. For example, a mandatory training meeting includes people who are being trained, who are in this category.

If the meeting fails to accomplish its objectives in 50 minutes, then participants may excuse themselves with a clear conscience, but they may find themselves less-informed than coworkers who chose to stay for the entire session. Especially if there is "Q&A" for clarifications at the end of it.

>The solution [...] is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am.

Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...

You can NEVER knowingly trick yourself with clock tricks.

Because all it will do is make you really good at time math.

I've seen it even back when people would set all their clocks in their car and home 5 minutes fast, they just got real good at doing five minute math.

Haha. I was one of those “set clock fast” people until one day realized that all it did was make the time I was supposed to be somewhere even more ambiguous than before. It never helped me arrive somewhere exactly on time, but certainly contributed to me arriving late because my mind forgot precisely what time my clock was set to relative to real time.

In that case you can just keep scheduling it for 9:00 to 10:00, I guess?

But I agree with the parent, if you need to move something then move the start.

This was the de-facto practice for courses at U of M and I loved it. Although it appears they may have ended that practice in 2018

https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...

Our team collectively decided all meetings should start 5 min late and end at the half hour boundary (we do 55min instead of 50min).

This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.

I presume in that case each meeting would just stretch to 10 over the hour.

Well that's the claim, isn't it. People tend to see an hour tick over and think "well, better wrap up". The impulse is much less strong at ten minutes to the hour. It's a bit like pricing things just below a round number because it doesn't feel quite so expensive. GP's comment makes sense to me.

My team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway.

For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.

If "30" minute meetings start 5 minutes late, then you can only go 5 past reliably.

In most places I've worked it's de rigueur to give people at least 5 mins to arrive before proceeding. Do people really just start meetings the instant they get in the room?!

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