9 ms·

How to Attend Meetings

341 points by spagoop 10mo ago

peterangular 10mo ago
Love these slides, hard agree on _all_ points. But, be absolutely certain on the culture before you start declining meetings, even if for valid reasons like outlined in this presentation. Declining meetings can be seen as a negative, "not a team player", thing... and, I really have to be certain on my leadership, the company, and the context before I push back on someone wanting my time. Even if their request for my time was arbitrary, or useless.
- jf 10mo ago
  I think that’s why the document had some suggested pushback to meeting invites (e.g. “what’s the agenda so I can prepare”)
  - peterangular 10mo ago
    Yep! And, I send that exact message/email all the time in good faith. But, even with that - if someone just wants to talk, trying to nail them down on a topic can be _seen_ as obstructive, even though it's productive. Unfortunately, lots of people who schedule meetings just want to talk with not much outcome. I'm being pedantic, but my experienced inverse of these slides is that meetings are the "social" part of work. It really really depends on the company, the leadership, the people. But, sometimes - it's more in your professional interest to talk about + market the work vs. actually doing it. Ultimately, we agree :)
    - zmgsabst 10mo ago
      In my experience, sometimes the job is just to talk and socialize — eg, with sister teams or stakeholders. For my own sanity, I at least try to accurately label those… which is how my calendar usually fills with “1:1”, “coffee”, “sync”, etc. Maybe it’s pedantic, but the accurate labels help my sanity by letting me know which meetings I can show up without prep, a coffee and cookie, and push if things get busy.
jf 10mo ago
As somone who vigorously declines meetings, this gave me some extra criteria to use (estimated speaking time per attendee) What I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every meeting that I schedule.
jmkd 10mo ago
Should be a doc on the harder skill of how to schedule meetings, then you wouldn't need a guide on how to attend them.
- JadeNB 10mo ago
  Educating people on how to schedule meetings requires that everyone else have the skill for you to benefit. Educating people on how to attend meetings only requires that you have the skill for you to benefit.
- bbarn 10mo ago
  I think the cultural norm of a stance like this for attendees will condition people over time to follow the opposite side of things.
xnx 10mo ago
I'd also add that if nothing was written down (and ideally sent to participants afterward), the meeting was a waste of time.
garciasn 10mo ago
I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it. --- For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of which are followed nor what anyone else wants. Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
- peterangular 10mo ago
  Often, corporate culture is more about maintaining status-quo vs. actually achieving or organizing efforts. People often just want to hear themselves talk, stroke their ego, and position/politic. As an IC/leader/owner this can be _so_ annoying. Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent team.
- dasil003 10mo ago
  That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback should be given 1-1), but rest assured plenty of folks understand and will not hold it against you if you vote with your attendance.
  - wiseowise 10mo ago
    > empower individuals Eye roll How to detect a "leader".
    - kortilla 10mo ago
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
Had an idea These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules. So... What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.
- unregistereddev 10mo ago
  I'm somewhat convinced this is already a thing. It would explain some of the meeting notices I get.
- shoo 10mo ago
  > Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. Like phishing training, but for meeting attendance. Fail the test and accept a decoy meeting and you must complete a round of mandatory training in how to distinguish a useless meeting from one that is worth attending. I wonder if enterprises would buy this? Phishing training companies make a living.
  - remyp 10mo ago
    I attempted a startup to fix meeting culture a few years back. Selling the product was nearly impossible. We got some nibbles and a couple bites, but it eventually became clear that the vast majority of companies just don't care about the problem. They'll tell you it's a problem (because it is) but nobody wants to write a check to fix it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
  >What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. What could this possibly accomplish? I accept meeting requests not because I have some perverse desire to waste my time (and everyone else's), but because when I fail to show up for meetings (as has happened, quite by accident), I get shit for it. The eastern European folks are constantly setting meetings before 8am, but they can't just set them and leave them there. They'd delete these, put them at another time, but forget to include my name in the list... and then my boss starts giving me hell for why I'm not showing up to them. Yeh, I love getting up at 5:30am just so I can psychically deduce that you're all in an early morning meet. So now you'd want to spam up my inbox with 15% more meetings, but I have to guess which of these imbecilic invitations are the real ones, and to taunt me if I can't always tell? I'm not the problem here, punishing me can't improve this for anyone.
smallnix 10mo ago
The flow diagram for yes/no attend meeting is missing to weigh the estimated impact you can make against other meetings. Even if I can contribute real value to 20 meetings which I am invited to, I can't attend all of them.
tehjoker 10mo ago
Does underrate discussion. Larger shifts in strategy require iterated discussion and consensus formation. Not every meeting is this, nor should it be, but this is something that is underrepresented and under respected.
potatoproduct 10mo ago
I would like to skip most of my meetings, but it would likely damage most of my working relationships.
arjie 10mo ago
I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer. e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons. In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them. I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.
- wswope 10mo ago
  Whisper-X does speaker-annotated transcripts nicely. I’ve used it for running multi-hour TTRPG sessions with friends and it worked hassle-free after setup. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
  - igor47 10mo ago
    I also do this with my ttrpg games!
  - satvikpendem 10mo ago
    Check out Parakeet as well , faster and more accurate in my experience
  - arjie 10mo ago
    Terrific. Thank you!
- 10mo ago
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Where did this come from? Source? Date (2024?) Brian doesn't work at NYT anymore I don't think
- drjasonharrison 10mo ago
  And google now says it has been removed.
- keane 10mo ago
  The title card is cached by reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1pbr587/how_to_attend_meetings_internal_guidelines_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1pbr587/how_to_... How to Attend Meetings Brian Peterson Product @ The New York Times It looks this is another presentation by the same author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA3ZLLkJmVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA3ZLLkJmVk and he also appears to be on LinkedIn.
lazzlazzlazz 10mo ago
Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly. This seems to be missed by the author.
- solatic 10mo ago
  Using meetings to sync on status is an anti-pattern. Questions can be asked in tickets and shared documents. True feelings are rarely shared in large forums anyway and are only reliably shared in private 1:1 sessions.
  - TheSockStealer 10mo ago
    Everyone having a common understanding of the state of the world is important and not always efficient, or even possible, to do it async. Ideally, everyone would have good response times on messages and emails, always write clearly, but this is the real world, and you can't guarantee that. Often, tickets bounce back and forth between people for weeks when a quick meeting will answer things quickly. Sometimes this is best to happen in Status meetings IMO.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly. No, there are none. Whoever does those needs to check their fucking ego and just send an email/update md file like a normal human.
- maccard 10mo ago
  At a previous team, our ceo would send out a weekly 5 minute “catch up” video. This covered pretty much everything you needed to know in our company, it saved so many hours, until people complained it could be a message, and then people couldn’t find the message in the other updates and eventually it became a bimonthly hour long meeting for 60 people as they always do!
gxt 10mo ago
There's John Cleese's Meetings Bloody Meetings for good meeting hygiene training. Its entertaining and educational. https://archive.org/details/meetingsbloodymeetings https://archive.org/details/meetingsbloodymeetings
bartread 10mo ago
Interesting that "Small - Brainstorming" is marked as a bad meeting flavour. I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've worked with are like this. But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely must brainstorm then "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a brainstorming meeting. Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse. Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and practice most of it as well.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Typescripter 10mo ago
This was great!
next_xibalba 10mo ago
"Small brainstorming" is a bad meeting flavor? Not sure I agree with that. I find that brainstorming meetings with >3 people turn into trainwrecks. Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time waste for most companies.
grvdrm 10mo ago
Could NYT also produce two more guides? 1. How To Use Teams/Slack/Etc. 2. How To Use Email Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up. Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make email intentional and high-value. Point being: if any one of (1) email, or (2) chat, or (3) meetings is not working well, I bet you have problems in either or both of the others.
- ponector 10mo ago
  There is no sense to send email with several points/questions. People select two of ten point to answer conveniently ignoring the rest.
gabeh 10mo ago
I remember Merlin Mann, of "Inbox Zero" fame, coming to Twitter to talk about improving meetings around 2010. His list was a superset of this and forever shaped my approach to meetings. The change management part of fixing this behavior is a much heavier lift than you might expect. These are behaviors that are engrained well before the current environment.
dandano 10mo ago
These are fantastic! I've done similar and seen some positive outcomes at work. As the one usually sending meetings - I have been leaning heavily on asynchronous first (teams chat) then if needed we hop into a focused meeting with a clear agenda. It's been liberating to see the reactions that other people like this too instead of another meeting. More often than not we never needed the meeting.
oconaros 10mo ago
Change management is the issue, not meeting management. I worked for an agency who hired productivity consultants[1] to help with meetings, email, and time management. I thought it was a very courageous choice. It’s extremely hard to measure the impact of this type of engagement, and some people hated it. The system was good though. I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I’ve tried many productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that stuck (other than GTD). Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a stan [1] https://doublegemini.com/ https://doublegemini.com/
codemac 10mo ago
While I have several disagreements with this deck, there are two large ones: 1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to prepare for the weekly staff meeting, rather than many small meetings every day. It also avoids the problem of people feeling not included - you're always invited to the one huge meeting every week, it's up to you to attend or skip. 2. The problem with meeting culture cannot be solved with education on how to say no, it's about admitting that attending meetings actually does convey a lot of things. Lots of information is not shared outside of meetings. Seniority of attendees actually does have a huge impact on visibility in folks' careers. A lot of the advice in this slide deck feels like it should work, but doesn't in practice because of self interest. The education that needs to happen is quite different imo: - leadership needs to be done through writing - meetings should be recorded and minutes sent out broadly, along with allowing silent attendance. - decisions need to give time for dissent outside of meeting attendees before committing.
- earthdeity 10mo ago
  While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful. I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that: 1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several times. 2. Most useful subordinate information (the kind that doesn't get repeated) only needs to be related to 1 person 80%+ of the time. It's vanishingly rare 3 or more people need some information that isn't ever repeated elsewhere. The only really useful work in meetings is making decisions. This is an essential feature, but a big problem is often many "spectators" are invited (attendees without decision power or context). Being a pure spectator in a meeting is almost always completely pointless. Also, people like to make decisions/input so meetings are rife with bike shedding (most people have decision power + context for low importance items usually).
makeitdouble 10mo ago
To be blunt, this looks like a feel-good piece from someone who spent an ungodly amount of time in shitty meetings but have no agency on the situation, will vent with diagrams as they can't tackle the actual issues of the org not giving a shit about their time. If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped. Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are. It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them. Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job. Or a mix of both. Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.
mvkel 10mo ago
The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary. "Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!" "Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic." Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executive summary of a book instead of reading the book. You're letting the clock dictate the importance of something to a company, and not the something. It's like delaying a huge feature launch because the person in charge of it is out sick. The reading -is the thing-. Discussing the difficult decision is -the thing-. I recognize that there is a fishbowl effect, where if you allocate four hours for a meeting about office dishwasher etiquette, you'll be amazed that all four hours are filled with lively, constant discussion. So there does need to be some light facilitation. But I'd argue that over-facilitating is just as unproductive as under-facilitating. As for the other stuff, agendas are great. A purpose for a meeting is great. Having the right people in the meeting, great. Relatedly, the craziest thing I keep hearing in corporate land is this idea of "open calendars." So your hard-won 15-minute lunch break can vanish because someone drops a meeting on it, and you first hear about it via email notif. Calendars should be opt-in, period.
- samschooler 10mo ago
  Could this be handled with an agenda? I'm thinking being candid about the meeting length. "Although I feel like this may take 30 minutes, scheduling a 15 minute buffer for Q&A, we may end early"
- delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago
  I been a part of endless meeting with ”lively discussion” with the whole team. Results are always slim to none. Instead if you allocate 15 minutes for a topic and there is no conclusion, stop the discussion and say that it must continue on another allocated time. This way people come better prepared with an actual agenda to get things done.
- willio58 10mo ago
  As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”. The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics. Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.
ngriffiths 10mo ago
One of the costs of saying no to meetings is that going to other people's (useless) meetings is a super low effort way to say "I value our working relationship." Not going often explicitly sends the opposite message. Sometimes there is a whole set of rituals used to "prove" you actually care about the group, and the rituals only ever happen in meetings, and you cannot change them without bothering a lot of people.
- superconduct123 10mo ago
  Also sometimes who gets to work on a future project is just based on perceived interest And not going to a meeting may be perceived that you aren't interested in that project
khet 10mo ago
People attend meetings for job security, not to accomplish an agenda. Being seen as important, is important. You can't solve this without true ownership, and employees aren't owners.
jrochkind1 10mo ago
I'm tickled by the idea of someone using that flowchart and determining -- can I contribute a unique perspective? Absolutely! Does my unique perspective have value? No way!
- jwrallie 10mo ago
  Been there with a team that ignores important advice, has an issue that was avoidable, ask for help fixing it, then forget all about it when you give another advice.
greekrich92 10mo ago
How to Attend Meetings - Internal Guidelines from A.G. Sulzberger's Racial Science and Phrenology Blog
- drjasonharrison 10mo ago
  I tried googling parts of that and could not find it. Is it online?
  - greekrich92 10mo ago
    It's at www dot nyt dot com
throw4847285 10mo ago
I have a feeling, though I lack proof, that opinions about meetings are strongly correlated with temperament. Specifically, extraversion as defined in the Big Five. I suspect that people low on extraversion are overrepresented on this site, and those people tend to hate meetings most. To be clear, I think the reason why temperament is important is that if you put a gun to everybody's head, they actually agree on the ideal type of meeting, though they will quibble about the details. The amount of quibbling reveals that the real issue is more emotional than practical. Some people, by nature have a much higher tolerance for imperfect meetings, and even enjoy an unstructured conversation to recharge their social battery. Some people very much do not, and are correct that this is a waste of their time, and if they don't get anything out of it, they shouldn't have to take part. I'm in the camp where I don't mind meetings at all, but I can be empathetic to people who hate them. Plus, Zoom meetings feel like methadone anyway. Real in-person conversation feels both better and more productive, but don't let the bosses hear me say that. They don't need any more ammo for forced RTO. Anyway, somebody should do a study.
breppp 10mo ago
Oh the magical solution to "we are having too many meetings", which is always "let's have a meeting about too many meetings". Saw it play out in five places already, I thought a 150 year old company would be over this by now
lokar 10mo ago
What’s wrong with a small brainstorming meeting?
raviisoccupied 10mo ago
> If you don't schedule it, it's not real Personally I find this kind of approach infantilizing. I don't think it's fair to have an expectation of yourself or of your colleagues to spell out in Google Calendar what you/they are spending their time doing throughout the day. People should look at gaps in people's diaries not as opportunities for new meetings, but as time someone is probably spending doing something important or interesting.
jader201 10mo ago
Red flag: the meeting has more than 10 attendees (maybe even fewer). Decline. Meetings with more than 10 attendees usually means only one - maybe 2-3 - people are talking. This can be recorded and shared out. Don’t make me sit through a monologue at 1x, with most of the content not relevant to me. We don’t need all-hands meetings. Have the execs get together if they must, record the presentation, and send out the recording. Viewing should be optional, since likely only middle management cares about it anyway. They can, then, disseminate the relevant info to their teams, if there’s anything that’s relevant (the relevant bits can likely be summed up in 60 seconds). Meetings only make sense if all parties invited will be talking, or all the information shared is highly relevant to them. Otherwise, there are better forms of communicating the information other than a synchronous meeting.
jjk166 10mo ago
These slides miss most of the point of meetings. You don't just go to talk, you go to listen. Generally if you have enough information that you know what you will share and can expect to receive at a meeting, it should be an email. People can share things on their timetable in the style they are most comfortable with and the information can be reviewed without anyone needing to worry about meeting minutes. Even when you are uncertain exactly what will be required or gained, email is still generally the better option. People can look up the answers to questions instead of speaking off the top of their head about something they were unprepared for, and people with low stakes can skim the conversation for the bits that are relevant. Meetings are for highly unstructured, free-form communication where you really need to talk through something. That's not to say an agenda can't be useful, but it should be nothing more than a starting point. Meandering discussions that don't really accomplish anything besides sharing information no one realized they needed are the point. If the meeting doesn't efficiently accomplish what you wanted, that's because you used the wrong tool for the job. Meetings are best when the communication is multiplicative. For example in a brainstorming session where people build off eachother's thoughts in rapid succession. The more people contribute, the more everyone benefits. Even very low value contributions may be key catalysts. You don't get creativity and emotional investment and comradery by keeping a tight schedule. All too often people will try to lump a bunch of different things together into a single meeting which really should be handled separately, and then try to use the agenda to recover the specificity of the various portions of the meeting. This never works well. Because everything gets improperly handled in one meeting, you need more meetings to revisit the various parts, and oftentimes those too have other things mixed in. Often you'll have a meeting to prepare for the meeting with a select group, and a meeting to follow up the meeting with a different select group, and of course the results of these meetings beget even more meetings. The ubiquitous feeling that a meeting was useless is almost always because you had a legitimately useful reason for holding or attending the meeting that was not accomplished. You don't fix this by holding better organized meetings, you fix this by eliminating the need for these meetings. --- As an aside, I find it funny that there is a slide stating meeting attendance is a choice and then a subsequent slide listing optional meetings as a red flag.
- maxclark 10mo ago
  Did anyone make a copy they can share?
tonymet 10mo ago
Though these guides are well meaning, they completely misread the inadvertent outcome of meetings. Even a perfectly planned meeting has a number of other effects beside resolving the stated agenda. When and how people are invited and declined, who attends, who engages, how people engage are all signals gleaned from a meeting. Think of how many times someone felt jilted by not being invited, called on, not responded to -- etc -- during a meeting. If you consider yourself hyper rational and business focused, you have to account for the personal dynamics occurring before, during & after a meeting. You ever wonder why everyone "hates" meetings, yet they still invest in them? Even being cynical or dismissive is a form of attention. Meetings are like money in that people are interested even though they say otherwise.
- blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
  No, people are interested in the outcomes of meetings. They aren’t interested the meetings themselves. On the off chance they care deeply about hearing one person’s perspective - there are much better ways to get that.
  - tonymet 10mo ago
    I would mostly agree , with the caveat that there are more unstated outcomes and they matter as much as the agenda
  - Dumblydorr 9mo ago
    Some people get their vitamin people from meetings. They may live alone and not know anyone locally. They may want to feel more personal connection. I don’t usually feel that way myself but sometimes it does help with loneliness oddly enough.
patcon 10mo ago
The only meeting resilient to all possible outcomes is one that can easily be split. Sometimes you need to branch the timeline, and people need to talk about different things that are the right things for their priorities. In real space you can do this easily, but in tools like zoom, it needs to be blessed form above (creating breakouts). Digital tools suck for running effective meetings that can have a branching timeline.
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
The "recurring meeting" thing as a red flag is one that I have always used. If I had control of the agenda, I didn't schedule recurring meetings (this includes standups). I didn't always have a choice, though.
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
I worked for a Japanese corporation, and meetings were their DNA. Attendance at meetings conferred the ability to participate in a project, so teams would often send "placeholders." People that had no idea what the meeting was about, but their presence meant their team was represented. It's quite common to see people sleeping in meetings, over there.
qweqweqwe12 10mo ago
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kkddbtbb 10mo ago
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kbos87 10mo ago
There's so much content and so many opinions on "meetings" that are polarized and come from a very narrow viewpoint. This particular POV seems reasonably critical of meetings but also recognizing that they are often warranted and can be carried out effectively. I was happy to see "rallying the troops" as an acceptable reason to have a big meeting, because in my opinion it can be a good reason for a big meeting to exist (even though I'm sure many people disagree.)
Yondle 10mo ago
The comments on this post are wild. Its advice. You don't need to "um actually" with every edge case you can imagine. Have your shitty meetings if you so desire.
_ea1k 10mo ago
They must not use scrum or safe
helsontaveras18 10mo ago
Did anyone make a copy? File is deleted.
- peterbrianson 10mo ago
  Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...
kkddbtbb 10mo ago
Policy very likely enacted due to the Jeffrey Toobin incident.
EGreg 10mo ago
URL has been deleted NYTimes acts quickly!
PaulCarrack 10mo ago
Link is dead. Did anyone make a copy that can reupload?
- Zenbit_UX 10mo ago
  I would also like a copy, someone in this community must have made a copy. #Mirror for quick searcher's.
  - PaulCarrack 10mo ago
    It really is a tragedy. I can't find it anywhere and I really wanted to reference it for future meetings. @spagoop can you reupload it?
    - RheingoldRiver 9mo ago
      in case you didn't see it, there's a mirror here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...
- peterbrianson 10mo ago
  Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC... One clarification: these are not official internal NYT meeting guidelines; rather, they are learnings from throughout my career that I documented and presented within my teams and departments when I worked at NYT. They developed a life of their own and were shared around the company over the years, but this is the first time I've seen them "escape" and get shared outside. Enjoy!
  - PaulCarrack 10mo ago
    Thank you so much Brian, I'm so glad I got to read it again. Great slides, great content. You are an expert at your craft. I'll definitely share this with my teams!
jslpc 10mo ago
Anyone get the slideshow before it was taken down? Link no longer works.
- PaulCarrack 10mo ago
  I've searched everywhere and it seems gone forever. It was a hell of a slide deck and I wish I had downloaded it before it got taken down. I'd potentially pay money to see it again.
  - peterbrianson 10mo ago
    Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy, no money required: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...
- peterbrianson 10mo ago
  Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
It’s now gone. I suspect The Times pulled it, after it got hugged to death.
dSebastien 10mo ago
I consider it a key part of my job to reject as many stupid meetings as I can. I accept meetings that have actual potential to change the status quo and bring progress. I choose between conflicts based on that too.
migp 10mo ago
No file !
migp 10mo ago
No visible file !
emddudley 10mo ago
Looks like it has been deleted. Does anyone have a copy?
- peterbrianson 10mo ago
  Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC... Enjoy!
stevenjgarner 10mo ago
"Sorry, the file you have requested has been deleted." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112906
sennalen 10mo ago
Some of the most valuable meetings I've ever had were optional meetings without agendas. The crucial feature was it was only people who code. When technical people who didn't often interact with each other were given the floor, they turned out to have lots of important things to say.

341 points by spagoop 10mo ago

Love these slides, hard agree on _all_ points. But, be absolutely certain on the culture before you start declining meetings, even if for valid reasons like outlined in this presentation. Declining meetings can be seen as a negative, "not a team player", thing... and, I really have to be certain on my leadership, the company, and the context before I push back on someone wanting my time. Even if their request for my time was arbitrary, or useless.

jf 10mo ago
I think that’s why the document had some suggested pushback to meeting invites (e.g. “what’s the agenda so I can prepare”)
- peterangular 10mo ago
  Yep! And, I send that exact message/email all the time in good faith. But, even with that - if someone just wants to talk, trying to nail them down on a topic can be _seen_ as obstructive, even though it's productive. Unfortunately, lots of people who schedule meetings just want to talk with not much outcome. I'm being pedantic, but my experienced inverse of these slides is that meetings are the "social" part of work. It really really depends on the company, the leadership, the people. But, sometimes - it's more in your professional interest to talk about + market the work vs. actually doing it. Ultimately, we agree :)
  - zmgsabst 10mo ago
    In my experience, sometimes the job is just to talk and socialize — eg, with sister teams or stakeholders. For my own sanity, I at least try to accurately label those… which is how my calendar usually fills with “1:1”, “coffee”, “sync”, etc. Maybe it’s pedantic, but the accurate labels help my sanity by letting me know which meetings I can show up without prep, a coffee and cookie, and push if things get busy.

jf 10mo ago

As somone who vigorously declines meetings, this gave me some extra criteria to use (estimated speaking time per attendee) What I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every meeting that I schedule.

jmkd 10mo ago

Should be a doc on the harder skill of how to schedule meetings, then you wouldn't need a guide on how to attend them.

JadeNB 10mo ago
Educating people on how to schedule meetings requires that everyone else have the skill for you to benefit. Educating people on how to attend meetings only requires that you have the skill for you to benefit.
bbarn 10mo ago
I think the cultural norm of a stance like this for attendees will condition people over time to follow the opposite side of things.

xnx 10mo ago

I'd also add that if nothing was written down (and ideally sent to participants afterward), the meeting was a waste of time.

garciasn 10mo ago

I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it. --- For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of which are followed nor what anyone else wants. Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.

peterangular 10mo ago
Often, corporate culture is more about maintaining status-quo vs. actually achieving or organizing efforts. People often just want to hear themselves talk, stroke their ego, and position/politic. As an IC/leader/owner this can be _so_ annoying. Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent team.
dasil003 10mo ago
That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback should be given 1-1), but rest assured plenty of folks understand and will not hold it against you if you vote with your attendance.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > empower individuals Eye roll How to detect a "leader".
  - kortilla 10mo ago

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago

Had an idea These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules. So... What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.

unregistereddev 10mo ago
I'm somewhat convinced this is already a thing. It would explain some of the meeting notices I get.
shoo 10mo ago
> Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. Like phishing training, but for meeting attendance. Fail the test and accept a decoy meeting and you must complete a round of mandatory training in how to distinguish a useless meeting from one that is worth attending. I wonder if enterprises would buy this? Phishing training companies make a living.
- remyp 10mo ago
  I attempted a startup to fix meeting culture a few years back. Selling the product was nearly impossible. We got some nibbles and a couple bites, but it eventually became clear that the vast majority of companies just don't care about the problem. They'll tell you it's a problem (because it is) but nobody wants to write a check to fix it.
NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
>What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. What could this possibly accomplish? I accept meeting requests not because I have some perverse desire to waste my time (and everyone else's), but because when I fail to show up for meetings (as has happened, quite by accident), I get shit for it. The eastern European folks are constantly setting meetings before 8am, but they can't just set them and leave them there. They'd delete these, put them at another time, but forget to include my name in the list... and then my boss starts giving me hell for why I'm not showing up to them. Yeh, I love getting up at 5:30am just so I can psychically deduce that you're all in an early morning meet. So now you'd want to spam up my inbox with 15% more meetings, but I have to guess which of these imbecilic invitations are the real ones, and to taunt me if I can't always tell? I'm not the problem here, punishing me can't improve this for anyone.

smallnix 10mo ago

The flow diagram for yes/no attend meeting is missing to weigh the estimated impact you can make against other meetings. Even if I can contribute real value to 20 meetings which I am invited to, I can't attend all of them.

tehjoker 10mo ago

Does underrate discussion. Larger shifts in strategy require iterated discussion and consensus formation. Not every meeting is this, nor should it be, but this is something that is underrepresented and under respected.

potatoproduct 10mo ago

I would like to skip most of my meetings, but it would likely damage most of my working relationships.

arjie 10mo ago

I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer. e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons. In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them. I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.

wswope 10mo ago
Whisper-X does speaker-annotated transcripts nicely. I’ve used it for running multi-hour TTRPG sessions with friends and it worked hassle-free after setup. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
- igor47 10mo ago
  I also do this with my ttrpg games!
- satvikpendem 10mo ago
  Check out Parakeet as well , faster and more accurate in my experience
- arjie 10mo ago
  Terrific. Thank you!
10mo ago

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

Where did this come from? Source? Date (2024?) Brian doesn't work at NYT anymore I don't think

drjasonharrison 10mo ago
And google now says it has been removed.
keane 10mo ago
The title card is cached by reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1pbr587/how_to_attend_meetings_internal_guidelines_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1pbr587/how_to_... How to Attend Meetings Brian Peterson Product @ The New York Times It looks this is another presentation by the same author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA3ZLLkJmVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA3ZLLkJmVk and he also appears to be on LinkedIn.

lazzlazzlazz 10mo ago

Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly. This seems to be missed by the author.

solatic 10mo ago
Using meetings to sync on status is an anti-pattern. Questions can be asked in tickets and shared documents. True feelings are rarely shared in large forums anyway and are only reliably shared in private 1:1 sessions.
- TheSockStealer 10mo ago
  Everyone having a common understanding of the state of the world is important and not always efficient, or even possible, to do it async. Ideally, everyone would have good response times on messages and emails, always write clearly, but this is the real world, and you can't guarantee that. Often, tickets bounce back and forth between people for weeks when a quick meeting will answer things quickly. Sometimes this is best to happen in Status meetings IMO.
wiseowise 10mo ago
> Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly. No, there are none. Whoever does those needs to check their fucking ego and just send an email/update md file like a normal human.
maccard 10mo ago
At a previous team, our ceo would send out a weekly 5 minute “catch up” video. This covered pretty much everything you needed to know in our company, it saved so many hours, until people complained it could be a message, and then people couldn’t find the message in the other updates and eventually it became a bimonthly hour long meeting for 60 people as they always do!

gxt 10mo ago

There's John Cleese's Meetings Bloody Meetings for good meeting hygiene training. Its entertaining and educational. https://archive.org/details/meetingsbloodymeetings https://archive.org/details/meetingsbloodymeetings

bartread 10mo ago

Interesting that "Small - Brainstorming" is marked as a bad meeting flavour. I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've worked with are like this. But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely must brainstorm then "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a brainstorming meeting. Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse. Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and practice most of it as well.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

Typescripter 10mo ago

This was great!

next_xibalba 10mo ago

"Small brainstorming" is a bad meeting flavor? Not sure I agree with that. I find that brainstorming meetings with >3 people turn into trainwrecks. Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time waste for most companies.

grvdrm 10mo ago

Could NYT also produce two more guides? 1. How To Use Teams/Slack/Etc. 2. How To Use Email Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up. Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make email intentional and high-value. Point being: if any one of (1) email, or (2) chat, or (3) meetings is not working well, I bet you have problems in either or both of the others.

ponector 10mo ago
There is no sense to send email with several points/questions. People select two of ten point to answer conveniently ignoring the rest.

gabeh 10mo ago

I remember Merlin Mann, of "Inbox Zero" fame, coming to Twitter to talk about improving meetings around 2010. His list was a superset of this and forever shaped my approach to meetings. The change management part of fixing this behavior is a much heavier lift than you might expect. These are behaviors that are engrained well before the current environment.

dandano 10mo ago

These are fantastic! I've done similar and seen some positive outcomes at work. As the one usually sending meetings - I have been leaning heavily on asynchronous first (teams chat) then if needed we hop into a focused meeting with a clear agenda. It's been liberating to see the reactions that other people like this too instead of another meeting. More often than not we never needed the meeting.

oconaros 10mo ago

Change management is the issue, not meeting management. I worked for an agency who hired productivity consultants[1] to help with meetings, email, and time management. I thought it was a very courageous choice. It’s extremely hard to measure the impact of this type of engagement, and some people hated it. The system was good though. I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I’ve tried many productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that stuck (other than GTD). Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a stan [1] https://doublegemini.com/ https://doublegemini.com/

codemac 10mo ago

While I have several disagreements with this deck, there are two large ones: 1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to prepare for the weekly staff meeting, rather than many small meetings every day. It also avoids the problem of people feeling not included - you're always invited to the one huge meeting every week, it's up to you to attend or skip. 2. The problem with meeting culture cannot be solved with education on how to say no, it's about admitting that attending meetings actually does convey a lot of things. Lots of information is not shared outside of meetings. Seniority of attendees actually does have a huge impact on visibility in folks' careers. A lot of the advice in this slide deck feels like it should work, but doesn't in practice because of self interest. The education that needs to happen is quite different imo: - leadership needs to be done through writing - meetings should be recorded and minutes sent out broadly, along with allowing silent attendance. - decisions need to give time for dissent outside of meeting attendees before committing.

earthdeity 10mo ago
While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful. I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that: 1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several times. 2. Most useful subordinate information (the kind that doesn't get repeated) only needs to be related to 1 person 80%+ of the time. It's vanishingly rare 3 or more people need some information that isn't ever repeated elsewhere. The only really useful work in meetings is making decisions. This is an essential feature, but a big problem is often many "spectators" are invited (attendees without decision power or context). Being a pure spectator in a meeting is almost always completely pointless. Also, people like to make decisions/input so meetings are rife with bike shedding (most people have decision power + context for low importance items usually).

makeitdouble 10mo ago

To be blunt, this looks like a feel-good piece from someone who spent an ungodly amount of time in shitty meetings but have no agency on the situation, will vent with diagrams as they can't tackle the actual issues of the org not giving a shit about their time. If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped. Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are. It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them. Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job. Or a mix of both. Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.

mvkel 10mo ago

The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary. "Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!" "Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic." Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executive summary of a book instead of reading the book. You're letting the clock dictate the importance of something to a company, and not the something. It's like delaying a huge feature launch because the person in charge of it is out sick. The reading -is the thing-. Discussing the difficult decision is -the thing-. I recognize that there is a fishbowl effect, where if you allocate four hours for a meeting about office dishwasher etiquette, you'll be amazed that all four hours are filled with lively, constant discussion. So there does need to be some light facilitation. But I'd argue that over-facilitating is just as unproductive as under-facilitating. As for the other stuff, agendas are great. A purpose for a meeting is great. Having the right people in the meeting, great. Relatedly, the craziest thing I keep hearing in corporate land is this idea of "open calendars." So your hard-won 15-minute lunch break can vanish because someone drops a meeting on it, and you first hear about it via email notif. Calendars should be opt-in, period.

samschooler 10mo ago
Could this be handled with an agenda? I'm thinking being candid about the meeting length. "Although I feel like this may take 30 minutes, scheduling a 15 minute buffer for Q&A, we may end early"
delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago
I been a part of endless meeting with ”lively discussion” with the whole team. Results are always slim to none. Instead if you allocate 15 minutes for a topic and there is no conclusion, stop the discussion and say that it must continue on another allocated time. This way people come better prepared with an actual agenda to get things done.
willio58 10mo ago
As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”. The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics. Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.

ngriffiths 10mo ago

One of the costs of saying no to meetings is that going to other people's (useless) meetings is a super low effort way to say "I value our working relationship." Not going often explicitly sends the opposite message. Sometimes there is a whole set of rituals used to "prove" you actually care about the group, and the rituals only ever happen in meetings, and you cannot change them without bothering a lot of people.

superconduct123 10mo ago
Also sometimes who gets to work on a future project is just based on perceived interest And not going to a meeting may be perceived that you aren't interested in that project

khet 10mo ago

People attend meetings for job security, not to accomplish an agenda. Being seen as important, is important. You can't solve this without true ownership, and employees aren't owners.

jrochkind1 10mo ago

I'm tickled by the idea of someone using that flowchart and determining -- can I contribute a unique perspective? Absolutely! Does my unique perspective have value? No way!

jwrallie 10mo ago
Been there with a team that ignores important advice, has an issue that was avoidable, ask for help fixing it, then forget all about it when you give another advice.

greekrich92 10mo ago

How to Attend Meetings - Internal Guidelines from A.G. Sulzberger's Racial Science and Phrenology Blog

drjasonharrison 10mo ago
I tried googling parts of that and could not find it. Is it online?
- greekrich92 10mo ago
  It's at www dot nyt dot com

throw4847285 10mo ago

I have a feeling, though I lack proof, that opinions about meetings are strongly correlated with temperament. Specifically, extraversion as defined in the Big Five. I suspect that people low on extraversion are overrepresented on this site, and those people tend to hate meetings most. To be clear, I think the reason why temperament is important is that if you put a gun to everybody's head, they actually agree on the ideal type of meeting, though they will quibble about the details. The amount of quibbling reveals that the real issue is more emotional than practical. Some people, by nature have a much higher tolerance for imperfect meetings, and even enjoy an unstructured conversation to recharge their social battery. Some people very much do not, and are correct that this is a waste of their time, and if they don't get anything out of it, they shouldn't have to take part. I'm in the camp where I don't mind meetings at all, but I can be empathetic to people who hate them. Plus, Zoom meetings feel like methadone anyway. Real in-person conversation feels both better and more productive, but don't let the bosses hear me say that. They don't need any more ammo for forced RTO. Anyway, somebody should do a study.

breppp 10mo ago

Oh the magical solution to "we are having too many meetings", which is always "let's have a meeting about too many meetings". Saw it play out in five places already, I thought a 150 year old company would be over this by now

lokar 10mo ago

What’s wrong with a small brainstorming meeting?

raviisoccupied 10mo ago

> If you don't schedule it, it's not real Personally I find this kind of approach infantilizing. I don't think it's fair to have an expectation of yourself or of your colleagues to spell out in Google Calendar what you/they are spending their time doing throughout the day. People should look at gaps in people's diaries not as opportunities for new meetings, but as time someone is probably spending doing something important or interesting.

jader201 10mo ago

Red flag: the meeting has more than 10 attendees (maybe even fewer). Decline. Meetings with more than 10 attendees usually means only one - maybe 2-3 - people are talking. This can be recorded and shared out. Don’t make me sit through a monologue at 1x, with most of the content not relevant to me. We don’t need all-hands meetings. Have the execs get together if they must, record the presentation, and send out the recording. Viewing should be optional, since likely only middle management cares about it anyway. They can, then, disseminate the relevant info to their teams, if there’s anything that’s relevant (the relevant bits can likely be summed up in 60 seconds). Meetings only make sense if all parties invited will be talking, or all the information shared is highly relevant to them. Otherwise, there are better forms of communicating the information other than a synchronous meeting.

jjk166 10mo ago

These slides miss most of the point of meetings. You don't just go to talk, you go to listen. Generally if you have enough information that you know what you will share and can expect to receive at a meeting, it should be an email. People can share things on their timetable in the style they are most comfortable with and the information can be reviewed without anyone needing to worry about meeting minutes. Even when you are uncertain exactly what will be required or gained, email is still generally the better option. People can look up the answers to questions instead of speaking off the top of their head about something they were unprepared for, and people with low stakes can skim the conversation for the bits that are relevant. Meetings are for highly unstructured, free-form communication where you really need to talk through something. That's not to say an agenda can't be useful, but it should be nothing more than a starting point. Meandering discussions that don't really accomplish anything besides sharing information no one realized they needed are the point. If the meeting doesn't efficiently accomplish what you wanted, that's because you used the wrong tool for the job. Meetings are best when the communication is multiplicative. For example in a brainstorming session where people build off eachother's thoughts in rapid succession. The more people contribute, the more everyone benefits. Even very low value contributions may be key catalysts. You don't get creativity and emotional investment and comradery by keeping a tight schedule. All too often people will try to lump a bunch of different things together into a single meeting which really should be handled separately, and then try to use the agenda to recover the specificity of the various portions of the meeting. This never works well. Because everything gets improperly handled in one meeting, you need more meetings to revisit the various parts, and oftentimes those too have other things mixed in. Often you'll have a meeting to prepare for the meeting with a select group, and a meeting to follow up the meeting with a different select group, and of course the results of these meetings beget even more meetings. The ubiquitous feeling that a meeting was useless is almost always because you had a legitimately useful reason for holding or attending the meeting that was not accomplished. You don't fix this by holding better organized meetings, you fix this by eliminating the need for these meetings. --- As an aside, I find it funny that there is a slide stating meeting attendance is a choice and then a subsequent slide listing optional meetings as a red flag.

maxclark 10mo ago
Did anyone make a copy they can share?

tonymet 10mo ago

Though these guides are well meaning, they completely misread the inadvertent outcome of meetings. Even a perfectly planned meeting has a number of other effects beside resolving the stated agenda. When and how people are invited and declined, who attends, who engages, how people engage are all signals gleaned from a meeting. Think of how many times someone felt jilted by not being invited, called on, not responded to -- etc -- during a meeting. If you consider yourself hyper rational and business focused, you have to account for the personal dynamics occurring before, during & after a meeting. You ever wonder why everyone "hates" meetings, yet they still invest in them? Even being cynical or dismissive is a form of attention. Meetings are like money in that people are interested even though they say otherwise.

blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
No, people are interested in the outcomes of meetings. They aren’t interested the meetings themselves. On the off chance they care deeply about hearing one person’s perspective - there are much better ways to get that.
- tonymet 10mo ago
  I would mostly agree , with the caveat that there are more unstated outcomes and they matter as much as the agenda
- Dumblydorr 9mo ago
  Some people get their vitamin people from meetings. They may live alone and not know anyone locally. They may want to feel more personal connection. I don’t usually feel that way myself but sometimes it does help with loneliness oddly enough.

patcon 10mo ago

The only meeting resilient to all possible outcomes is one that can easily be split. Sometimes you need to branch the timeline, and people need to talk about different things that are the right things for their priorities. In real space you can do this easily, but in tools like zoom, it needs to be blessed form above (creating breakouts). Digital tools suck for running effective meetings that can have a branching timeline.

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago

The "recurring meeting" thing as a red flag is one that I have always used. If I had control of the agenda, I didn't schedule recurring meetings (this includes standups). I didn't always have a choice, though.

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago

I worked for a Japanese corporation, and meetings were their DNA. Attendance at meetings conferred the ability to participate in a project, so teams would often send "placeholders." People that had no idea what the meeting was about, but their presence meant their team was represented. It's quite common to see people sleeping in meetings, over there.

qweqweqwe12 10mo ago

[dead]

kkddbtbb 10mo ago

[dead]

kbos87 10mo ago

There's so much content and so many opinions on "meetings" that are polarized and come from a very narrow viewpoint. This particular POV seems reasonably critical of meetings but also recognizing that they are often warranted and can be carried out effectively. I was happy to see "rallying the troops" as an acceptable reason to have a big meeting, because in my opinion it can be a good reason for a big meeting to exist (even though I'm sure many people disagree.)

Yondle 10mo ago

The comments on this post are wild. Its advice. You don't need to "um actually" with every edge case you can imagine. Have your shitty meetings if you so desire.

_ea1k 10mo ago

They must not use scrum or safe

helsontaveras18 10mo ago

Did anyone make a copy? File is deleted.

peterbrianson 10mo ago
Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...

kkddbtbb 10mo ago

Policy very likely enacted due to the Jeffrey Toobin incident.

EGreg 10mo ago

URL has been deleted NYTimes acts quickly!

PaulCarrack 10mo ago

Link is dead. Did anyone make a copy that can reupload?

Zenbit_UX 10mo ago
I would also like a copy, someone in this community must have made a copy. #Mirror for quick searcher's.
- PaulCarrack 10mo ago
  It really is a tragedy. I can't find it anywhere and I really wanted to reference it for future meetings. @spagoop can you reupload it?
  - RheingoldRiver 9mo ago
    in case you didn't see it, there's a mirror here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...
peterbrianson 10mo ago
Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC... One clarification: these are not official internal NYT meeting guidelines; rather, they are learnings from throughout my career that I documented and presented within my teams and departments when I worked at NYT. They developed a life of their own and were shared around the company over the years, but this is the first time I've seen them "escape" and get shared outside. Enjoy!
- PaulCarrack 10mo ago
  Thank you so much Brian, I'm so glad I got to read it again. Great slides, great content. You are an expert at your craft. I'll definitely share this with my teams!

jslpc 10mo ago

Anyone get the slideshow before it was taken down? Link no longer works.

PaulCarrack 10mo ago
I've searched everywhere and it seems gone forever. It was a hell of a slide deck and I wish I had downloaded it before it got taken down. I'd potentially pay money to see it again.
- peterbrianson 10mo ago
  Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy, no money required: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...
peterbrianson 10mo ago
Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC...

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago

It’s now gone. I suspect The Times pulled it, after it got hugged to death.

dSebastien 10mo ago

I consider it a key part of my job to reject as many stupid meetings as I can. I accept meetings that have actual potential to change the status quo and bring progress. I choose between conflicts based on that too.

migp 10mo ago

No file !

migp 10mo ago

No visible file !

emddudley 10mo ago

Looks like it has been deleted. Does anyone have a copy?

peterbrianson 10mo ago
Hello, I'm the Brian that made these slides. Here's a copy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC_4S10SkrzexH_MM4kkNCYlM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-d9rRsFnC8zUkeFrkVC... Enjoy!

stevenjgarner 10mo ago

"Sorry, the file you have requested has been deleted." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112906

sennalen 10mo ago

Some of the most valuable meetings I've ever had were optional meetings without agendas. The crucial feature was it was only people who code. When technical people who didn't often interact with each other were given the floor, they turned out to have lots of important things to say.