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Comment by megaman22 | Hacker News Reader

This. 95% of meetings could be replaced by sending a couple of emails, or just paying attention to the bug tracker/version control system.

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Many of those 95% happen because either:

1. People don't read their E-mails promptly or

2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail.

I've seen E-mail chains that lasted WEEKS, where a 45-minute meeting would have been enough to resolve the problem.

Two things, was it something that needed to get done in the next 45 minutes? If not then a meeting is a big hammer for a small problem. If it only took 10 mins spread out over the course of several weeks it is still a time savings.

Second sure the discussion part could have been dealt with in a 45 minute meeting but how long did the thinking part take? Perhaps someone tested a few theories before presenting what they thought was the best approach in a short email. You aren't going to do that in a meeting you either end up taking the path of least resistance or you end up in another meeting after everyone has had a chance to go think and try stuff out.

"Two things, was it something that needed to get done in the next 45 minutes? If not then a meeting is a big hammer for a small problem. If it only took 10 mins spread out over the course of several weeks it is still a time savings."

Not true. There is an overhead to loading the relevant context into your brain each time you approach the issue.

Looking at an issue 10 times over the course of a month is typically going to take much longer "person time" than blocking out the time to look through an issue all at once.

> 2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail.

Use IM, a chat room, whatever. Just use something that is persistent and can actually be referenced afterwards.

At which point, you might as well be in a physical meeting. You're either synchronously communicating (and not paying attention to something else) or you're not.

Except a physical meeting involves getting up from your desk, going somewhere, waiting around for everybody else to get there, having whatever meeting you're supposed to be having, hopefully without anyone taking it off the rails into some unrelated tangent, winding down the meeting, then going back to your desk. There's a lot of wasted time there, and I get very irritated by other people wasting my time.

Then there's the fact that nobody ever records the audio of in-person meetings, and almost never actually takes minutes or notes of what was decided, so the only record of it is the progressively hazy memories of the participants. So then you have another meeting next week to rehash the shit you just went over.

Besides the need for brief physical activity, these are people-problems and not problems specific to physical meetings.

Showing up late can happen in chat rooms.

Taking it off the rails into a tangent can happen in chat rooms.

Not ensuring accurate minutes are recorded is a failure of whoever is conducting the meeting, and should never happen.

I agree completely that these are people problems.

I have a huge preference for technical solutions that do the right thing by default, rather than trying to get people to do their jobs right. Most people are aggressively mediocre and don't seem to have any impulse to do their jobs in the most efficient way. So I can either get on their ass and chaff them along all the time to do things right, or you can use tools that make doing the right thing easier than not doing the right thing.

If that's the case, then isn't it part of the 5% that actually warrants a meeting?

Or just paying attention and being focused in the first meeting.

Meetings are generally run by people that like to hear themselves talk. Those of us that have to get shit done don't get a lot of benefit from hearing people bikeshed and ramble for forty-five minutes or an hour, when you could write up the ideas discussed in a more concrete form in five minutes and email it around.

Text is a whole lot more efficient than talk. People actually have to present ideas in a coherent way when they are written down, since it's actually in a persistent form and doesn't admit the same hand-waviness and slop that speech does.

If you consider meetings as one-way communication then I understand that you think it is a waste of time. But if you are trying to understand what a non-technical customer actually needs, then a ten minute meeting might save you a hundred emails and a lot of grievances in the end. To write effective emails, you need to have a common language, which is missing more often than some people realize.

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