Good idea, after trying it a number of times, it has some downsides. Most calendar applications cannot clearly display 5 minutes past, and the meeting appears to start on the hour visually. One of the attendees ends up dialling in at the hour, and then everyone gets a notification that the meeting has started.
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 :)
During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.
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.
I’ve experienced this all before in similar ways. The metric for meetings ending on time isn’t even very useful because when it’s needed people will ask “do you have a hard stop?” or similarly agree to continue the meeting. Often because of all the points you made, it’s the IC that stick around to talk about finer points or specifics of what was decided or discussed. It’s best to do this while it’s fresh and between people that can “talk shop” at a granular level (whatever that means for your org/team). It’s actually a good thing your ICs want to collaborate or align separate from management. If you’re a manager and you could technically continue on the meeting, consider opting out to give them space as peers. I often ask “do you all need me to stay one?” and most often it’s a No. It all means that it’s basically 2 meetings occurring and it’s the scheduling calendar artifact that is faulty.
How about just be punctual, respecting the time others have agreed to meet with you? Simpler solution than what this article suggests. People will abuse that system just the same anyway.
Sounds like the issue is back to back meetings then.
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.
Novelty might be a factor but the author was relying on "social pressure" to wrap things up by top of the hour. That pressure doesn't exist in all work cultures.
My org had the opposite problem in the Covid remote transition. At one point we successfully enforced meetings ending 5 minutes before the hour, but then somebody would just open the next meeting 5 minutes early.
I was bad in being on meeting discipline. The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals. If someone joins late, they catch up from notes/recording.
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.
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.
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.
Unfortunately this is the reality. If I’m on with a big external partner/client and they need to finish their thought I’m going to be late to an internal meeting. If it’s too late I will try to slack and say go ahead.
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
On the exact opposite side, I remember when I first started working and was used to keeping an eye on the clock because of, oh, 16 years of school that had us timed to the minute. I'd walk into meeting rooms right when it was supposed to start and interrupt whoever was in the previous meeting and was going over. Surprised a lot of people like that.
I find it interesting when people such as the writer of the linked post take their experience and think it can just be applied to everyone else, and it'll always be a positive outcome.
We got bunch of internal meetings starting at quarter past instead of full hour and mostly we can get it finished in 45mins.
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.
I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.
It’s been shown before that a couple minutes of pleasantries helps the meeting. I’m guessing it helps regulate everyone on a similar vibe. A lot like saying hello to someone and maybe how are you doing before launching into any requests.
Those awkward 5 minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion are because other people don't join until 5 minutes past, and sitting in silence would be even more awkward.
I suppose this may be the case for a lot of people. In my case it is always the two managers talking about their life and/or child's successes. This still occurs when _they_ are the late ones.
I do love that zoom feature that shows the avatars of who’s joined already. Although I don’t like the game theory of it when every attendee is watching those icons…
I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(
I think it's likely a problem with me specifically - I said no to going to celebrations like christmas lunch etc. But at the same time our team doesn't interact with each other socially in any other way. I'm very new to the job, so it isn't that I pushed everyone away from me, there just wasn't any closeness in the first place. It doesn't really help that I don't much like the job either.
But there are other times for that, why in a meeting? I chitchat during day 1-1 (virtual/irl) with my teammates, I don't, for etiquette, have to do it again when starting a meeting.
> But there are other times for that, why in a meeting?
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.
I agree maybe ideally not in a meeting, but humans are imperfect and the larger the number of people invited, the greater the chance it’s going to take a few mins for everyone to arrive. So inevitably the folks who are prompt do some water cooler talk while waiting, and depending on the day/group/topic the water cooler talk might even extend a few mins after everyone has arrived, especially if people are enjoying the convo.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
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.
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.
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).
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.
This is more a statement to the lack of respect for other's time than anything else, as evidenced by the presumption; "you will likely talk until 2:00pm anyway."
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.
Our org does 5 minutes past for a 30-minute window, and 10 minutes past for an hour or longer. Works great once everyone gets it. Can be confusing for new hires.
I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).
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.
this rule makes all worse sorry. our PO/BE tries to do this but no one cares anymore. why not just start/end at a given time? meeting starts at 9, be there, it ends at 10, rage quit.
It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.
I suggested this to management at my company and they shot it down almost immediately. Narrow-minded middle manager types generally aren't receptive to this kind of out-of-the-box thinking unless they think it's an idea they've come up with.
If you have so many back-to-back meetings, maybe put in a school bell that chimes at 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the hour. Please just put this in your conference rooms so those of us who know how to evade meetings don't have to hear it as well.
I mean you can't make people read an email but I feel like you would have a much higher success rate if the content was in the email itself. You're competing with the other work that people have to do and actually get graded on, why add a layer of indirection?
People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.
We've been doing this at Qualcomm for a while, and I really like it. While meetings do run over sometimes, the practice has still built this acceptance around short breaks between meetings. No one bats an eye if we've got two consecutive meetings together, the first one ends late, and we wait five minutes before starting or joining the next one.
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
some teams at my org start 5 mins past some don't... result, some people hop on early and keep waiting and some meetings ppl don't show up for at least 5 mins.
I don't know about others but if I'm gonna have 3 meetings in a day, I'd take them back-to-back anyday. Then the rest of my day is available for focus work.
When I have 5 hours of meetings in a given day, I'd much rather have them back-to-back, rather than with a half-hour or hour in between. I try to pack all my meetings for the week into a couple of days, so that I have the rest of the week to do non-meeting work.
There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets.
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.
Some meetings are more important than others. So losing 5 minutes of a useless meeting is better than not going over 5 minutes for the important meeting.
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.
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.
> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late
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).
> Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality?
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.
The solution I like best is to "pin" issues that would cause the meeting to run long, with select personnel needing to stay late to address the pinned issue but everybody else leaving on time.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots.
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.
We start the meeting at 2 minutes past. Meetings end at 10 minutes before the hour (or half hour) - yes, "30 minute" meetings are only effecitvely 18 minutes, but we leave a few minutes of buffer.
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.
Good idea, after trying it a number of times, it has some downsides. Most calendar applications cannot clearly display 5 minutes past, and the meeting appears to start on the hour visually. One of the attendees ends up dialling in at the hour, and then everyone gets a notification that the meeting has started.
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 :)
[delayed]
During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.
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.
I’ve experienced this all before in similar ways. The metric for meetings ending on time isn’t even very useful because when it’s needed people will ask “do you have a hard stop?” or similarly agree to continue the meeting. Often because of all the points you made, it’s the IC that stick around to talk about finer points or specifics of what was decided or discussed. It’s best to do this while it’s fresh and between people that can “talk shop” at a granular level (whatever that means for your org/team). It’s actually a good thing your ICs want to collaborate or align separate from management. If you’re a manager and you could technically continue on the meeting, consider opting out to give them space as peers. I often ask “do you all need me to stay one?” and most often it’s a No. It all means that it’s basically 2 meetings occurring and it’s the scheduling calendar artifact that is faulty.
What are ICs?
Individual Contributors - not managmenet
How about just be punctual, respecting the time others have agreed to meet with you? Simpler solution than what this article suggests. People will abuse that system just the same anyway.
This. In my experience you have to call out people and tell them politely that you expect them to be on time.
Otherwise, people will simply come 10 minutes past if you start 5 minutes past.
We do this at my work and guess what - meetings tend to run 5 minutes late because everyone knows the next meeting doesn’t start until 5 past.
Sounds like the issue is back to back meetings then.
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.
Meeting software should eject everyone when the time is reached.
Zoom offers this feature, but you have to not-pay for it.
Works best when your meetings are 40 minutes long
Isn’t the point of TFA that meetings _unavoidably_ run 5 minutes late, and so starting at 0:05 will avoid being impacted by the previous meeting?
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…
Yeah, this works because it's novel. If it became the norm, people would adjust to it and we'd right back where we started.
Novelty might be a factor but the author was relying on "social pressure" to wrap things up by top of the hour. That pressure doesn't exist in all work cultures.
This is standard at the large tech company where I work and is extremely effective and universally respected.
My org had the opposite problem in the Covid remote transition. At one point we successfully enforced meetings ending 5 minutes before the hour, but then somebody would just open the next meeting 5 minutes early.
I was bad in being on meeting discipline. The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals. If someone joins late, they catch up from notes/recording.
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.
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.
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.
> People will learn to show up quickly.
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.
Unfortunately this is the reality. If I’m on with a big external partner/client and they need to finish their thought I’m going to be late to an internal meeting. If it’s too late I will try to slack and say go ahead.
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
On the exact opposite side, I remember when I first started working and was used to keeping an eye on the clock because of, oh, 16 years of school that had us timed to the minute. I'd walk into meeting rooms right when it was supposed to start and interrupt whoever was in the previous meeting and was going over. Surprised a lot of people like that.
I find it interesting when people such as the writer of the linked post take their experience and think it can just be applied to everyone else, and it'll always be a positive outcome.
We got bunch of internal meetings starting at quarter past instead of full hour and mostly we can get it finished in 45mins.
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.
I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.
In my experience the unrelated discussion is usually the only fun and tangible value I get out of most meetings
It’s been shown before that a couple minutes of pleasantries helps the meeting. I’m guessing it helps regulate everyone on a similar vibe. A lot like saying hello to someone and maybe how are you doing before launching into any requests.
Those awkward 5 minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion are because other people don't join until 5 minutes past, and sitting in silence would be even more awkward.
I suppose this may be the case for a lot of people. In my case it is always the two managers talking about their life and/or child's successes. This still occurs when _they_ are the late ones.
This is borderline anti-social and a bit past introvert haha
I do love that zoom feature that shows the avatars of who’s joined already. Although I don’t like the game theory of it when every attendee is watching those icons…
I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(
I think it's likely a problem with me specifically - I said no to going to celebrations like christmas lunch etc. But at the same time our team doesn't interact with each other socially in any other way. I'm very new to the job, so it isn't that I pushed everyone away from me, there just wasn't any closeness in the first place. It doesn't really help that I don't much like the job either.
But there are other times for that, why in a meeting? I chitchat during day 1-1 (virtual/irl) with my teammates, I don't, for etiquette, have to do it again when starting a meeting.
> But there are other times for that, why in a meeting?
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.
I agree maybe ideally not in a meeting, but humans are imperfect and the larger the number of people invited, the greater the chance it’s going to take a few mins for everyone to arrive. So inevitably the folks who are prompt do some water cooler talk while waiting, and depending on the day/group/topic the water cooler talk might even extend a few mins after everyone has arrived, especially if people are enjoying the convo.
Glad to know I'm not alone
"How was your weekend?" I really don't care.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
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.
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.
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).
From the article:
This is more a statement to the lack of respect for other's time than anything else, as evidenced by the presumption; "you will likely talk until 2:00pm anyway."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.
Our org does 5 minutes past for a 30-minute window, and 10 minutes past for an hour or longer. Works great once everyone gets it. Can be confusing for new hires.
I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).
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.
MIT does this. Every class starts 5 mins past, and also ends 5 mins early.
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).
Creative idea, however most calendar software clients offer meeting start times rounded to increments of 15 min.
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.
Doesn't anyone have to hit the can between meetings?
Or are we all using catheters now?
My video is off for a reason!
this rule makes all worse sorry. our PO/BE tries to do this but no one cares anymore. why not just start/end at a given time? meeting starts at 9, be there, it ends at 10, rage quit.
It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.
Can this be solved by a random clock? A clock which never tells you the real time - it adds randomly 1-10 mins every morning
My question is if people can't adapt to it, would it be a helpful technique?
I suggested this to management at my company and they shot it down almost immediately. Narrow-minded middle manager types generally aren't receptive to this kind of out-of-the-box thinking unless they think it's an idea they've come up with.
Hour long meetings are a red flag. Meetings should be a maximum of 30 mins.
If you have so many back-to-back meetings, maybe put in a school bell that chimes at 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the hour. Please just put this in your conference rooms so those of us who know how to evade meetings don't have to hear it as well.
I'd recommend taking this even further. Start every meeting 30 minutes after the hour, and end it 30 minutes before the hour.
Got it, 24 hour long meetings it is.
Except for the weekly release meetings, those can be 48.
You don't understand. If I arrange everything into written words and send out an email with a link to the document, noone will read it.
Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"
We meet in person and have a culture where closing your laptop is followed pretty well.
That's so quaint, you all must be in the same place!
Except for the guy who built the thing who lives elsewhere and can’t join the offsites
I mean you can't make people read an email but I feel like you would have a much higher success rate if the content was in the email itself. You're competing with the other work that people have to do and actually get graded on, why add a layer of indirection?
People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.
I for one, support this...and reduce the Agenda to NO bullet points.
Apart from just a quick breather between back to back meetings, it also provides a critical bio-break time for your attendees.
Meetings run long so frequently that we now recommend starting the next meeting late to compensate.
This will surely solve the problem.
We've been doing this at Qualcomm for a while, and I really like it. While meetings do run over sometimes, the practice has still built this acceptance around short breaks between meetings. No one bats an eye if we've got two consecutive meetings together, the first one ends late, and we wait five minutes before starting or joining the next one.
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
some teams at my org start 5 mins past some don't... result, some people hop on early and keep waiting and some meetings ppl don't show up for at least 5 mins.
Back to back meetings?! Why on earth would you do that?
I don't know about others but if I'm gonna have 3 meetings in a day, I'd take them back-to-back anyday. Then the rest of my day is available for focus work.
I prefer not having back-to-back meetings.
When I have 5 hours of meetings in a given day, I'd much rather have them back-to-back, rather than with a half-hour or hour in between. I try to pack all my meetings for the week into a couple of days, so that I have the rest of the week to do non-meeting work.
I'd rather scatter them uniformly across the entire week, so in the time between meetings I can slack off, I mean, prepare for the next meeting.
There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets.
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.
Some meetings are more important than others. So losing 5 minutes of a useless meeting is better than not going over 5 minutes for the important meeting.
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
Only host important meetings.
Cancel useless ones.
Start and end on time.
If the person who runs the meeting can't stick to a schedule, it can't be important.
Any meeting without an agenda is a waste of time.
I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.
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.
> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late
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...
Our corporate IT managed to enable that setting for everyone, which made the transition easier. Doesn't stop people from overriding it, alas.
> Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality?
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.
The solution I like best is to "pin" issues that would cause the meeting to run long, with select personnel needing to stay late to address the pinned issue but everybody else leaving on time.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots.
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.
But how is anyone supposed cultivate their personal brand and write books and substack articles about this type of meeting “hack”. Party pooper.
;)
Absolutely. Insightful LinkedIn posts from thought leaders who complete every sentence or utterance of a thought with two line breaks...
Like this.
Aren't going to write themselves, are they? :D
This is exactly the problem. I don't know if any other sector of business runs on as much as fad as ours does.
Marketing/Sales?
In my experience, if the meeting is important enough policies like this don't matter.
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.
We start the meeting at 2 minutes past. Meetings end at 10 minutes before the hour (or half hour) - yes, "30 minute" meetings are only effecitvely 18 minutes, but we leave a few minutes of buffer.
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.
#leadership is really sending me on this one
That PHB pic is more relevant than the author is willing to admit to themselves.