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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Suggestion: Have an agenda, have rules to religiously follow the agendas and help each other follow the agenda. Once completed, meeting over.

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I started replying "No agenda, no attenda" after being in a few too many meetings where things dragged on, or where I clearly was not needed. Didn't matter if I was telling this to someone at the same level as me, or someone at the head of the department: the humor in the wording lessens the sting of the implied "stop being disorganized" message. I made it clear that if there was not a clear agenda in the meeting invite, I would not be attending.

Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.

I tried this once and my manager and skip level explained to me that sometimes it's necessary to make people get together in case anyone wanted to talk about something, not every meeting needs an agenda. Unsurprisingly, I was not a good fit for that team.

That is so terribly inefficient it makes me physically anxious.

This works great except 95% of the places I've been with bad meeting culture, it comes from the top.

Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.

In my experience, most folks appreciate a gentle hint to stick to the agenda. I don’t hang out with “execs” though.

Execs that have responsibilities appreciate sticking to agendas. But there are a lot of Elon Musks in the world.

Didn't Elon Musk have in his companies that thing of if you have no value to add or receive from a meeting, you can leave it?

How many people do you think skip his meeting?

No idea but someone who claims to work harder than just about everyone else while managing to be on social media all day is hilarious.

This goes way back further then Musk. I remember working at a large corporation in early 2000 before the first dot com crash that had severe meeting issues. At one point, I was having two or three hour long meetings during the week on what another meeting later in the week was supposed to cover.

The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.

Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.

Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them.

I've been through too many of these. They like to sit at the head of the table and bask in the glow of their underlings like they're king for an hour.

I’ve seen it come mostly from participants who are more dominant or verbose in the conversation than others, often leading to the meeting being a lengthy back and forth between two people because nobody else can get a word in and the person running or facilitating it isn’t keeping it in check.

Even with an agenda, nobody wants to be the guy that interrupts people to get them back on topic.

I frequently ask people whether they can discuss the diversion later with whoever is interested. It's not just me but part of company culture.

In other contexts I'm notorious for keeping people on the agenda. It's generally appreciated.

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