Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
philipotoole.com
philipotoole.com
Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.
I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:
1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late. 2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. 3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.
The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.
It's a relatively common term. I wouldn't read too much into it.
I'd rather not have by ass kissed with a term like "everyday innovator". -- "Individual Contributor" is fine.
E.g. If you aren't an SME or a Manager, then why are you in the meeting?
(SME encompasses PM and BA roles, as they too should be experts in their domain and ideally on the domain we are working on.)
It is unparsable Dilbert nonsense to anyone outside of specific scenarios. And it causes interminable discontent. Because what if the SME is the PM because they know business and tech but the SME is actually the IC because they know the tech and its tech but what if the manager is actually the SME because they're running the tech and may need to redelegate if the IC needs vacation, blah blah blah.
(job history: college dropout waiter => my own startup, sold => Google for 8 years => my own startup)
A human being who avoided corporate brainrot just writes “I worked with John and he was indispensable because (insert reasons you wrote here)”
I’m 37 and never heard of this acronym. That’s the entry-level version of my point. Not that other people hurt me or people knowing things is actually bad.
Or, if you truly do not need anyone but a "technologist" to deliver product, you must work in a pretty simple business space! I work in healthcare and our PhD's and MD's have a very, very different knowledge space than I do, I and I deeply respect their contributions.
ICs are generally considered highly valued staff.
if a company doesn’t intend to utilise IC then they don’t have ICs, just regular software engineers.
An IC is only an IC if the organisation is structured to utilise them as an IC. It isn’t a job title, it’s more to do with how an individual is utilised in a company. It’s their placement in the org structure.
> IC execute
IC plus engineers execute. IC are a subset of engineers.
Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.
If, instead, you would be Tom, Bill and Biff, there is a risk that the manager would build attachment, and make it harder to treat you bad. If you're IC1, IC2 and IC3, you can be exchanged like machine parts when you break, without anyone crying.
Welcome to the modern world! =)
- Does it even need to be a meeting? Keeping meetings to things that need 'a discussion or decision', and keeping updates and announcements to chat or email works fairly well.
- Does the meeting give you any value, or do you bring value to it? If both are no they should decline it.
- Is there an agenda with expected outcomes? No agenda and no goal means it should be declined.
- Are you doing something that's a higher priority? Seeing one of my reports in a meeting when there's an active incident in progress gets me asking questions.
- Does the person running the meeting share notes afterwards? One thing I've noticed over the last couple of decades is that people are much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards. People don't skip them if being in the meeting is the only way to know about what was discussed or decided. I always encourage people to write some notes and share them if they've set up a meeting now.
If you're just a 'follower' of what's going on, that's fine. The problem shows up when you have some stakeholder or steering ability.
If you miss meeting about X and don't bring up discussion about Y then other person A may not talk about Z that affects X. But I agree that every meeting should have a point and total number of meetings should be minimized.
I have had a few senior managers (at Google) who ask for all the meetings _they_ attend to start 5 minutes late.
This seems 100% reasonable to me. No need for it to be an org policy. Just a affordance for the people who spend 95% of their working hours in meetings.
I've also had several senior managers at Google who _don't_ do this, but are 5 minutes late for every meeting anyway. This alternative is pretty annoying!
Even better is they only need to use that method when meetings actually run full time rather than every single meeting they are in
What was really awful, however, was when your calendar was a random mishmash of starts at :00, :05, :30 and :35 :-)
That makes 200% sense. A couple or more ICs tend to want to stick around to go off topic or drill down on some thing if they don't have a conflict. People who aren't expressly relevant to that or have a conflict drop at that time.
You're basically seeing the post-meeting hall conversation of the ICs in your data.
Covid is supposed to have started in October 2019, and no one locked down until nearly six months later.
Dunno if people here know this Paul guy, but he wrote about this: https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html =)
I've never seen this pressure.
> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.
It's like I live in an entirely different world.
Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.
My bosses (leadership) are in meetings literally all day long. Them showing up 5 minutes late to an internal meeting has nothing to do with them "learning". It's entirely about priorities. Teaching them to "show up on time" does nothing and only hurts me for being obtuse with them.
Last job, the senior guy who I knew missed our breakfast meeting to discuss a job. Turned out that he had something come up with one of the regions and his admin didn't have my cell. Ended up with the job anyway where I stayed for a long time.
At the same time, we had a rule that meetings would start when they say they start. This was after being incredibly frustrated by a guy on another team who would schedule his meetings to start on the hour, but then display a message that said we’d start at 5 after, to give people time to join, assuming other meetings would run long. This felt like he was wasting everyone’s time who showed up on time, and had the net effect of everyone showing up late to his meetings. If people learned they should show up late to his meetings, they can learn to show up on time to our meetings. Then we can stop waiting around hoping that everyone shows up. When someone shows up late to a meeting that’s already well underway, that sends a strong signal that they should be on time for the next one.
Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:
- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion
- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting
- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.
Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.
I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
At previous companies this wasnt the case, so we started meetings on time
That said, nothing wrong with 30 minute meetings. In my previous analyst stint we tried to default to that--especially for non-clients. Didn't need all the throat-clearing stuff and industry background that we knew perfectly well.
I see two flaws:
1) This only works as long as nobody else does it. If the meeting prior to yours follows the same strategy then you’re in the same position as today
2) it starts 5 minutes later but has no plan for ending 5 minutes earlier, which means the next meeting will have to start at 0:10…
Decades ago at an engineering firm I worked for it was baked into the groupware settings.
The smelly basement nerd running IT seemed normal back then, but here are in 2026… Turns out he was an unsung smelly genius ahead of his time. A giant among men who bathe.
I work with a PM who is notorious for meetings running long. People just start hanging up while she’s talking if they have another meeting to go to. When she start hearing a bunch of beeps of people leaving, she starts to get the message that she needs to continue on the next meeting and stop. People are tired of it and don’t entertain it anymore, as much as she keeps trying to talk.
Also every meeting taking the exact time it was scheduled for is a bit of an org smell too. If you have your meeting etiquette dialed in you should hopefully be finishing meetings early more often than running over. If you are running to the minute or over all the time you might just be having crap meetings.
Half of the people who get the notification click "join" without checking. This ends up with a half-populated meeting room. The issue becomes obvious, and somebody says, "Let's dial back in 5 mins", and drops off. Half of the people like the idea and drop off, while the rest decide to stay and chat.
Meanwhile, some of those who dropped off see this as a great opportunity to grab a brew. That inadvertently triggers some water-cooler, kettle-corner chats, and they end up running late for the 5-past. The rest usually get engaged in something else to make use of 5 minutes, and miss 5-past since no new notifications are issued due to the people already chatting in the meeting :)
In academia (mostly European) this has been a concept for centuries to allow changes of classes to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_%28class_timi...
So you can have a c.t. event (cum tempore = with time) or a s.t. event (sine tempore = without time).
I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.
Alternatively you can build your own with MS Graph Data Connect but also it costs.
People have meetings because there's a need for a decision that requires conversation, and they're often late because they're coming from other meetings that ran late because they were having difficulty coming to a decision. Awareness of cost doesn't affect these at all. The decisions still need to happen.
A blanket force to reduce meetings isn’t quite the right incentive; we need incentives to have the right amount of meetings and to make them more effective. The right amount of meetings is probably always going to be more than ICs want, and less than managers want. But if you have any reliable ways to make that happen, to keep meetings effective, that’s gold. Charge money for that knowledge and consult, or become a CEO, either way you’ll get rich!
There’s a famous example from the Lucasfilm/Pixar deal: a Lucasfilm exec used to arrive late as a power move, until Steve Jobs started the meeting exactly on time without him. The exec walked in 5 minutes later and had already lost the room. And Jobs gets the deal.
Agree, but that doesn't solve the problem of back to back mtgs. In some cases people have to physically move from one mtg room to another, or they need to use the restroom, etc.
Having the 5 min gap really is needed for those types of things.
I work as an Engineering Manager ...
If you try to end at 1:55pm, you will likely talk until
2:00pm anyway, which then runs into the next meeting.
Engineering Managers which see value in giving coworkers a five minute break between meetings ensure the breaks exist. Those which do not and only pay lip service to the concept will burn through predefined breaks no matter where they exist on a clock face.
Otherwise, people will simply come 10 minutes past if you start 5 minutes past.
I think the point is to reduce meeting time from 60 minutes to 55 or even 50 and be firm about it. People need to expect to start and end on time; giving them a natural break between helps make this happen even for people whose job requires them to be in back-to-back meetings.
Personally, I think starting on the hour (or half-hour, etc) and ending "early" is better, because it tends to sync well with the calendars of external folks.
But in the end, moving start or end time is only part of the solution. This is a time-management problem, and in addition to constraining the available time, it also needs proper management of the available time within the meeting.
It matters because there sometimes are meeting where it is very important to know how much time you have to prepare appropriately. As long as the expectations are set beforehand, it matters less.
I roughly agree with the rest of your post. "Just be punctual" is a cop out that ignores the fact that I need to have enough breaks between meetings before I can even think about being punctual. Make space for breaks and enforce the time allocated is imo the solution, it matters less where exactly the 5-minute break fits (but I tend to agree that people would more likely end on the full hour, so that would mean we need to start 5 past).
And often if I'm in a meeting it's because I think the problem is important and I want it solved. Getting permission for my team to fix things, or getting other teams to agree to fix things, is the point.
Or what makes 60 minutes so magical that you can wrap up a meeting quickly once that marker approaches? People need to leave, that's why. If it had been clear from the start that people will leave after 50 minutes, you can wrap up by then, same way you wrap things up at 60.
There is a lot of slack in meetings. What you need is someone to manage the available time and move things along, make sure that there is room at the end to get to a conclusion. You will have these last 10 minutes after 40 minutes instead of 50 if you pay attention to time and keep things moving.
This can be done, even with time to spare for pleasantries. I know this because I've been in meetings and I have run meetings like this. It helps if you can start on time and don't have to wait for stragglers in the beginning who needed a break between their back-to-back meetings.
Isn't the easier solution to stop meetings 5 minutes to the next meeting slot?
I personally prefer the 5 minute gap, it's a simple and clean solution.
1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.
2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.
That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.
You start on time, you end on time.
The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.
But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)
Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.
This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.
Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.
I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.
If you're in-person in an office, there are plenty of times for random social interaction. If you're full-remote, pre-meeting/post-meeting time is a low-friction source of social interaction.
> How was your weekend?
Fine, just like literally thousands of previous weekends before this one. And now I’m going to ask you the same and then zone out for 5 minutes because I literally couldn’t care less.
This has nothing to do with being introverted.
The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).
I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.
I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.
We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.
Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.
People magically show up on time and pay attention and the meeting ends on time or early.
I have to assume this discussion is about the 90% of meetings that could have been a group chat or email chain.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
So 99% of my meetings?
Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.
Or are we all using catheters now?
Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.
I recall working at this place that prided itself on starting meetings a minute early, as if trying to prove a point. The early starts did prove that, yes, you could get people to scramble, but not much else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
Shifting everything from :00 to :05 is theatre at best, and a slippery slope more often.
This will surely solve the problem.
At one place where we were remote, we had a morning daily (I don't care to argue the usefulness of dailies, though).
When I joined as an IC, I added an emphatically-optional 15 minute "coffee chat" meeting preceding it on the same video chat link. Most people pretty consistently joined at some point before the start of the daily. Sometimes chat was about work, most often, it was just social.
IMO, it was worth it. It was low friction because it was next to a scheduled meeting at a time where a morning beverage was reasonable, and people felt no pressure to join.
Zero BS If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.
If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.
The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves
Why not set the alarm for 5 minutes prior and everyone shows up on time?
Setting meetings to start at :05 or :20 or :35 or :50 adds friction.
Defaults matter for habit formation.
There is your golden opportunity to point out internal Gemini to the Calendar codebase and make it become reality.
But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.
It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.
My question is if people can't adapt to it, would it be a helpful technique?
No need for hacks, just better managers
Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"
If that is the majority of your meetings, you are in a good place.
The mistake is to think the rules are what makes the meeting useful. Having the right audience, an agenda, and appropriate expectations for the outcomes are the useful things.
Except for the weekly release meetings, those can be 48.
As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.
The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.
The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:
1. Don't have back to back meetings
2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda
3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.
Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?
>also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time?
Depends on company, culture, and individuals. If you get through the purpose of the meeting, the meeting organizer may well say "Let's give everyone 20 minutes (or whatever) back." I do think that it's a worthwhile goal to default to <1 hour meetings.
In any case, agendas and thinking about how the meeting time should actually be spent is worthwhile.
You can tell this is written by a manager who has never written a line of code in their life. For me as an actual programmer, meetings were always the time where I had to stop working. It's staggering to me that managers still think real work happens in meetings.
We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.
Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.
;)
Like this.
Aren't going to write themselves, are they? :D
> Starts meeting after 5 minutes
"Uhm, shall we wait for Jeff?"
“Jeff you didn’t show up to the meeting. What happened?”
Jeff is eventually put on a PIP or fired for not showing up to meetings without notice.
We did this at Google too while I was there (only the started 5-mins past part). It works really well.
No need to change the Calendar events though. It's just implicit that we'll start 5-mins past. (Or, well, explicit in MIT's case).
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
If you can’t tell people to stop being late, you are not doing your job as a manager.
False.
This doesn’t work.
Source: a company doing this. Meetings just continue on to the 5 after mark.
Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.
If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
Cancel useless ones.
Start and end on time.
Words to live by.
honor end times so everyone has a few minutes to take a bathroom break or move to a diffrrent room, or prep mentally, etc
At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.
Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.
It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook).
However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in their minds (if nobody else is using such settings).
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/end-meetings-earl...
Whenever I'm having remote meetings with people using a Google meeting room, right at the hour they'll say "I'm getting kicked out", because the next person is waiting to use the booked meeting room.
Fixed time makes it so much easier to reason than random stuff.
But yeah, this guy work for google, says it all.