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Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings
- remyp 8y agoOP here, happy to answer your questions! Most importantly: We take privacy very seriously, none of your calendar data is stored, just tabulated, and as soon as we finish we remove the token so we can't access anything in the future. The ONLY thing we store is the tabulation and your email address (which is not made public) tied to that tabulation.
- Signez 8y agoIf you really care about our privacy that much, please configure the GDPR popup in a way[0] that let your EU visitors to say that they are not allowing third party usage of their personal data. [0] https://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/techradar-gdpr/ https://www.leonpaternoster.com/posts/techradar-gdpr/
- bwb 8y agoOP here, ya that shouldn't be. We used a GDPR service called ShareThis.com and I will check that as we do not share that with any 3rd party. [Update] - We are only doing 1st party consent so I will email their support to find out what the heck is going on with it showing that.
- vintagedave 8y agoFYI: the button has only I Accept and Customize options; that may violate the GDPR by not providing a No option. When you click Customize, and manually turn off all options, the very next page you visit will show you the GDPR prompt again - and again. This definitely violates the consent statutes. Please let your provider know so they can fix this bug, and on either their or your side, provide an option for a clear No button, or at the very least a quick way to disable all.
- adtac 8y agoInteresting. I have a product (unreleased, still in private beta) that's in the privacy space. I want people to know I care about their privacy, and that absolutely no information is given to third-parties. What's the best way I can get GDPR compliant? I know that GDPR isn't designed to crack down on products like mine, but I'm still legally required to comply. A simple notice saying user data isn't given to any third parties? I have a privacy policy, of course.
- gpm 8y agoApart from a privacy policy I do not believe any notice is necessary. The "notices" you see on pages today are actually asking for consent to store data, but you don't need to do that if you aren't storing data. (IANAL) As for bragging about your privacy stance - well - that's a product design decision. Personally I'd probably do it on the "why you should use this" style pages and leave it out of any functional pages.
- adtac 8y ago>The "notices" you see on pages today are actually asking for consent to store data Consent to store data or share it with third parties? I store PII, but I don't share it with any third-party.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoYea consent to collect it. Best way to comply with GDPR is read it carefully and/or hire a lawyer.
- prepend 8y agoCan you add an ability for me to upload a calendar file that I scrub out everything I don’t want you to have temporary access to?
- remyp 8y agoThis is a really good idea we hadn't thought of yet, thank you! We'd even be able to use the exact same logic to do the calculations...
- anyfoo 8y agoDo you have a team working full time on the security of your service? Taking privacy seriously is necessary, but not sufficient for protecting that most sensitive data.
- bwb 8y agoYes, security and privacy are the utmost concern for both of us. I want to stress we do not store any personal data, it only hits memory while we tabulate the results, and then we remove the token so we can't access it again. The only thing we store is your email to tie it to that tabulation.
- anyfoo 8y agoWhen you say you "remove" the token, does it continue to be valid? If the token accidentally leaks (logs?), or if someone willfully intercepts it, will they have access to the calendar?
- remyp 8y agoDepends on the service. Google allows us to invalidate the token when we're done, rendering it useless, so we do. You'll notice that if you run the stats tool again you'll have to re-authorize it for Google. Microsoft does not, so it will remain valid. We don't store it or log it anywhere, and the system that retrieves and processes data is not publicly accessible.
- adtac 8y ago>We don't store it or log it anywhere I know you have good intentions here, but I hope you are aware that you may unintentionally be storing it somewhere [1]. Not much you can do about it unless you keep actively searching for it everywhere. [1] I strongly remember reading an article here on HN recently about some security breach stemming from writing production secrets in log files, but I can't find the link :/ If anyone else has it, can you post it?
- double0jimb0 8y agoVery interesting. Any ideas on how to quantify productivity of the meetings? Insights into efficiency of a meeting would be helpful as well.
- bwb 8y agoYep, we are currently doing a ton of customer dev interviews for the paid version which is aimed at teams and/or the entire business. Part of what we are testing is spending 30 seconds at the end of each meeting to rate the meeting and using that to diagnose the specific dysfunction it had. We use that to learn about the specific dysfunctions inside teams, departments, and the entire organization. Then we fix that with software driven coaching, optional human coaching, and showing the damage to "makers" through analytics (and possibly peer pressure). We also have some crazier ideas we are testing such as allowing teams/businesses to do things like: - Block entire days or blocks of time from allowing meetings. - Require an agenda/purpose to a meeting 24 hours ahead of time or killing the meeting. - Setting a max time for meetings and if someone makes one for over a threshold we split it into two meetings to change the psychology and trying to finish it quickly. - Emailing the creator of the meeting the real cost of inviting so many people and asking them to verify it has value to the organization. - Tools to allow management/teams to kill off meetings that don't meet their criteria. Such as killing off all recurring meetings that are not 1v1, or setting hard limits on what % of your time is spent in meetings per job title. Basically a lot of ways to hard enforce good meeting culture... it might sound a bit draconian but I think we have all had the pain of being in a culture that doesn't know it has a meeting problem.
- woah 8y agoA lot of these are pretty drastic... not sure I'd want to commit to them without really talking it over with the team and getting all the stakeholders involved
- bwb 8y agoyep totally, we are not sure if anyone wants those too as they are pretty severe. The other option is we just feed that back into analytics so you can see how much it is happening and it does the software based coaching.
- osrec 8y agoThis looks cool. Just wondering, how do you define a meeting? Is it any calendar entry with multiple attendees?
- remyp 8y agoYep! We throw out anything over 8 hours long as well.
- igetspam 8y agoIt'd be nice to be able to change the average salary. This is HN, which means many of us are in tech jobs and the tech sector. Using 60k/year doesn't really do it justice. I like it though. If nothing else, it's sad fun.
- amirathi 8y agoNice! Meeting hell is a fantastic problem to take on. In the same vein, please consider generating stats for slack and other chat app usage as well. Would be very valuable to clearly see it's impact on roles primarily hired for building things.
- redhale 8y agoThis is awesome! I can't really use it though, since I often schedule "heads-down" sessions for myself (ironically because of meeting overload). I hope a future version allows me to add a text filter rule of some kind to exclude them.
- prepend 8y agoThis is cool, but no way am I granting access to a years worth of calendar. I like how they describe their usage and that they auto remove access. But even if I believe them, there are many errors that would expose hundreds of email, contact info, and docs. I wish they had a scrubber utility I run and can remove unnecessary data. They should not need pii for their stats.
- Paul_Dessert 8y agoI made a similar tool. It just uses user input data. It gives you a good snapshot of the cost of a meeting, but doesn't go as deep as OP's tool. https://www.resumebeacon.com/planning-to-plan.php https://www.resumebeacon.com/planning-to-plan.php
- bwb 8y agoVery cool Paul :). One thing we have played with on the business version is to send people who make meetings with more than 5 attendees an email to let them know how much that meeting is going to cost the company and to review who they invite. With the hope that makes them go "oh shit", maybe I don't need 16 people on this check-in.
- Paul_Dessert 8y agoThat's a good idea! Good luck :)
- tjoff 8y agoI mean if they can't even comply with GDPR (that awful popup) they obviously don't respect their users data to start.
- bwb 8y agoOuch :), we did work to comply with GDPR and we are. We do not share any of your data with anyone else and never will. I am not sure why they are reporting we are sharing with a 3rd party as we are not, and I have a support ticket open with the popup service to find out why. We will move tomorrow morning to a new one if we can't get that resolved. I am sorry for the trouble there :(.
- dotBen 8y agoEven with the promise that they'll delete the data after, it doesn't seem like a reasonable value exchange. I would assume that meta-data and derived data is still going to be preserved. This looks like it's lead-gen for a future service they are building.
- bwb 8y agoWe do not keep any meta-data or derived data, we literally tabulate the numbers you see on that screen and just store that and the email it is run with. Plus we kill off the token afterwards. So the only place personal data would be is the memory until it is cleared. We did this for fun, as a proof of concept for a paid saas idea, and because it might be a good lead gen source down the road. Our hope is people can use this to show their boss the pain meeting madness is causing, and what is preventing them from making. :)
- rob-d 8y agoI like this a lot. A similar thing which I'm interested in tracking is the impact of meetings on flow state. I wonder if it would be helpful to have a more nuanced way for "makers" to protect their flow state time than having to block out their calendar for hours / days at a time. I envisage a system where a meeting booker is able to make the decision - "Is the meeting important enough to curtail or split this person's flow state?".
- bwb 8y agoI love that idea! We are talking to a lot of people in Product roles to do just that. Basically blocking times or days out with no interruptions, as well as giving them the insight to protect their teams so they can work.
- rob-d 8y agoThat sounds interesting - got me thinking a little more about this. I wonder if simply by making the information available on when people are in flow state, a lot of flow state interruptions could be reduced, even without reducing the number of meetings. In particular, encouraging scheduling a meeting at the beginning / end of a flow state period rather than slap bang in the middle would have a big impact. For example, assume you want to work in flow from 10:00-12:30, scheduling a 15 minute meeting at 10:00 or 12:15 is preferable to scheduling one at 11:00, because you might still be able to get into flow for a couple of hours. I'd like to see a scheduling system which dynamically encourages people to assign other meetings to an already compromised flow period to keep other flow periods free (rather than just blocking things out). My worry is that without this, just focussing on minimal number of meetings / cost spent in meetings might not be enough. 3 badly scheduled 30 minute meetings might write off a whole day, whereas a single meeting of 1hr30 might have a much smaller impact, but on the raw "time spent in meetings" / "salary cost spent" metric these would seem equivalent.
- goliatone 8y agoHow do you reconcíliate future meetings with future flow states? Unless you have the ability to pospone a meeting when you are flowing I don’t see how to do this, unless you’re able to build a pattern over time and use that information to preemptively inform the organizer of best suited times to schedule a meeting
- vvoyer 8y agoVery well done, I always wanted to build a similar product. But all of those tools are always missing the most important feature from my POV: company wide statistics on meetings: - % of meetings per employees in time (i.e. are we more and more spending time in meetings since we are growing) - automatic employees group diagram/relations computation based on meetings invites - who's never in meetings (who's being solo) - who's always in meetings - % meetings without a clear agenda - % of recurring meetings ("bad") vs one-offs (ok) - meeting duration statistics - external vs internal attendees - anything else? All of those company wide metrics would be gold for any execs willing to understand why are we slowing down on delivery or just having a clear overview of the organisation and how they collaborate. Even for sales organisation this could be beneficial for tracking performance and suggesting strategies. If I want to know if I am spending too much time in meetings, I just have to look at my calendar and own gut feeling. But if I want to know it for the whole company, I have not easy data point. This startup had some meeting analytics tooling: https://medium.com/startup-grind/startup-mortality-what-end-of-life-care-teaches-us-about-startup-failure-7d568c736d90 https://medium.com/startup-grind/startup-mortality-what-end-.... But they stopped (maybe they should have focused ONLY on that). If anyone would be interested to build ^, ping me at wouaren@gmail.com
- thoughtpalette 8y agoWe built something at a previous company's hack days that was somewhat similar. We were sick of being in meetings when we didn't need to be. http://gotclocked.com/ http://gotclocked.com/ Angular.js Mandrill email API
- sj3k 8y agoThe place I work just wrapped up a white label project for your previous company. Small world.
- vvoyer 8y agoSide note, they could definitely enhance the tool by computing most of the data client side using a google calendar export. So nothing would ever go to their servers: https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37111?hl=en https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37111?hl=en
- madrox 8y agoI think anyone ever frustrated with their calendar has fantasized about building this, but I don't think it'll go well if you ever actually crunch these numbers and show them to your boss.
- jeffreym 8y agoVery interesting. Despite thinking I knew how much time I spent in meetings, I was still surprised by the stats. I like what was said by rob-d about flow state. There's a lot of ancillary "stuff" attached to meetings - anticipation, preparation, transportation, decompression, etc. Add the actual time in-meeting, and you have a proper interruption. Creating some variety of "meeting gravity," which would pull in, combine, or group other meetings contiguously would be welcome, particularly amongst those who are sensitive to interruptions in flow.
- screaminghawk 8y agoThis is the kind of tool I've been tossing up making myself. Such a great job! Quick, well presented. But, I wish I could correct the statistics. * I haven't had this email for a year (doesn't extrapolate) * My salary is much higher than $60k * I work a 37.5 hour week Also a way to combine meetings across my multiple email addresses would be icing on the cake.
- bwb 8y agoThanks or the feedback! Do you mean you have other calendars shared on this account you want this to pick up? Let me know a little there and thanks once again for the feedback :)
- chase-seibert 8y agoI’ve build a similar tool for a hackathon. What we found when we rolled this out to the whole company was that as soon as they saw the data for other people, they stopped worrying that we had a culture of too many meetings.
- o_____________o 8y agoThis is hilarious. Maybe make a portal for this that just includes a live counter for value lost based on average salaries x people in the room = $$ being spent. That would be a great passive aggressive thing to throw up on your laptop and aim toward the room.
- akx 8y agoOnce upon a time, I actually live-coded this during the time it took for people to set up a video call. I think it took about 30 minutes to get everyone online.
- imhoguy 8y agoI would need something like that to measure life spend in Slack channels and DMs. At least with a real meeting, a call or an ad-hoc talk you could focus on the one only, but forget it on Slack.
- binarymax 8y agoI would have loved to have this in my previous job. I estimate I was in meetings about 20 hours per week, of which 8 hours were actually useful. Glad I'm not in that situation anymore! Nice project.
- webwright 8y agoThis was (originally) exactly why we created RescueTime (YC08 - and still growing!). We'd sold a tiny/new startup that we'd created IN ALASKA to a large/overfunded startup (150ppl) in Seattle. We were convinced we were moving to the big leagues. Everyone would be so smart! We'd move 10x faster will the big league technology/processes! The reality was pretty terrible-- I felt like the entire company spent all day writing emails, going to meetings, and updating wikis... Which seemed pretty scary for a company that hadn't figured out its own product yet. We wanted a big chart showing the allocation of time spend so we could show it the exec team and say, "Is this on purpose?" The company ended up raising $50M and selling for less than $1M. The founder went on to create Fab.com, which raised $300M+ and sold for $15M.
- StavrosK 8y agoSorry, I'm kind of confused by the timeline. Which company was which? You say RescueTime is still growing, but then said it was sold for $1M? I think I misunderstood.
- quasse 8y agoI think he's saying that he created RescueTime as a reaction to the experience he's detailing in the comment (post Alaska startup).
- JoshMandel 8y agoVery cool -- I love the focus and the amount of information you can glean from calendar analysis. On this topic, since I joined Microsoft this summer, one of the off-the-shelf tools I've been most impressed with is the MyAnalytics dashboard (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-analytics/myanalytics/use/dashboard https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-analytics/myanaly...) built into Office online. I like that in addition to meetings, it also summarizes time spent on email and time spent working outside of "business hours" -- and decorates each stat with benchmarks to compare with company averages. I also appreciate the claim that "Only you have access to your MyAnalytics dashboard. MyAnalytics does not provide your manager or anyone else in your organization access to your dashboard." (Of course if push comes to shove, this is all company data, but I like that it's only shown to me by policy.)
- xfactor973 8y agoTried it out because this looks really useful however it hangs forever. >1hr I let it spin. Not sure exactly what happened.