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I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make

I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives. Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and praised. If you think of how much time you spend in meetings, some sort of meeting instruction/meeting consultant might just pay for itself in increased productivity. I am not a meeting consultant or a manager, but using robert's rules of order in a hobby community made me much better at meetings. Simple ideas like having the problem clearly stated, asking for proposed solutions, debating them by going back and forth from opposed to in support so that it's clear when the minority has all been heard from without having everyone have to put in 2 cents, only including actual stakeholders etc. Anyway that's not to distract from this effort, this seems like a great solution to any scheduling problems if nobody is in an open office. Of course video calls work best when everyone has private office space without an open plan.

dionian 8y ago
> I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives. I agree with this, a lot of this is human error and inefficiency and tendency to fill spaces > Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and praised. Not to take away from the good point of gender discrimination, but this happens a lot of guys too. It's a cut-throat world...
- lsiebert 8y ago
  I'm not sure why you raised your point, but unfortunately generalizing when a specific issue is raised is one of the problem things I see in meetings too. Like if someone says, "The front end is extremely slow loading the SPA in the browser because of legacy cruft," I see a lot of people relate that to their area or generalize, either "Analytics also takes forever, the email queue needs more workers/the db has slow queries, building the app takes too long, the mobile app take forever to sign in" etc etc, or "the whole tech stack is slow and needs improvement." No doubt all true, and sure perhaps speeding up DB queries by indexing on user email or whatever would speed up loading for signed in people, but the front end is still slow to load, and bringing up other issues doesn't solve the specific problem raised, if you get my point.
genevpd 8y ago
That is true that meeting productivity highly depends on meeting organizers. That role starts with figuring out if the meeting is needed, finding a time, inviting people who own the decision, etc. Not that many people good at it. But, what happens if we try to de-centralize the organizers? What if anybody can play a role of organizer of much smaller meetings (10 mins vs 60 mins)? What if there is a limit on how many meetings can be scheduled a day (1 hour vs 8 hours)? What if time reservations are not based on the first-in rule, but dynamic and based on the priority?
StavrosK 8y ago
I have tried to do some of that with a Slack bot project I'm working on, called Huxley: https://www.meethuxley.com/ https://www.meethuxley.com/ Basically, it used guided questions to get you to give structure to your meetings. I will add some of your suggestions, they sound very good. I should also get around to releasing it one of these days...
- genevpd 8y ago
  Happy to hear that there are other companies solving the same problem! We are working on Slack integration too, it will be possible to create & schedule Meetter topics right from Slack or from Teams.

dionian 8y ago

> I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives. I agree with this, a lot of this is human error and inefficiency and tendency to fill spaces > Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and praised. Not to take away from the good point of gender discrimination, but this happens a lot of guys too. It's a cut-throat world...

lsiebert 8y ago
I'm not sure why you raised your point, but unfortunately generalizing when a specific issue is raised is one of the problem things I see in meetings too. Like if someone says, "The front end is extremely slow loading the SPA in the browser because of legacy cruft," I see a lot of people relate that to their area or generalize, either "Analytics also takes forever, the email queue needs more workers/the db has slow queries, building the app takes too long, the mobile app take forever to sign in" etc etc, or "the whole tech stack is slow and needs improvement." No doubt all true, and sure perhaps speeding up DB queries by indexing on user email or whatever would speed up loading for signed in people, but the front end is still slow to load, and bringing up other issues doesn't solve the specific problem raised, if you get my point.

genevpd 8y ago

That is true that meeting productivity highly depends on meeting organizers. That role starts with figuring out if the meeting is needed, finding a time, inviting people who own the decision, etc. Not that many people good at it. But, what happens if we try to de-centralize the organizers? What if anybody can play a role of organizer of much smaller meetings (10 mins vs 60 mins)? What if there is a limit on how many meetings can be scheduled a day (1 hour vs 8 hours)? What if time reservations are not based on the first-in rule, but dynamic and based on the priority?

StavrosK 8y ago

I have tried to do some of that with a Slack bot project I'm working on, called Huxley: https://www.meethuxley.com/ https://www.meethuxley.com/ Basically, it used guided questions to get you to give structure to your meetings. I will add some of your suggestions, they sound very good. I should also get around to releasing it one of these days...

genevpd 8y ago
Happy to hear that there are other companies solving the same problem! We are working on Slack integration too, it will be possible to create & schedule Meetter topics right from Slack or from Teams.