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“Tinder for Canceling Meetings”
- theonlyriggs 3y agoWhen everyone swipes left, the meeting is canceled. A small project to get more focus time. From two people formerly at Loom.
- karmakaze 3y agoIt should be if everyone (or everyone but one person) swipes left, the meeting is cancelled--can't have a meeting with one person. Or maybe notify the only person so they can revise or reschedule it.
- MivLives 3y agoTo be fair, if one person thinks the meeting is worth it, it might be worth it. I've been in more then one meeting where everyone think they know what's happening correctly but everyone had a different interpretation and understanding of what actually needed to be done.
- SoftTalker 3y agoWell the person who scheduled the meeting clearly thinks it's important, so they aren't going to be swiping left on their own meeting. I don't see how this gets many meetings canceled, except maybe standing meetings that nobody wants to go to this week.
- the__alchemist 3y agoAsk Me About Loom!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- buu700 3y agoWhat would be great is the same feature for rescheduling. Sometimes a meeting is important and shouldn't be cancelled, but the scheduled day/time ends up being inconvenient for one reason or another. Not inconvenient enough to justify claiming a last-minute conflict, but enough that you would still rather do it another time if it turned out that everyone else was in the same boat.
- TylerE 3y agoAt least for me, if I'm even thinking about that I've already broken flow and might as well just attend the damn meeting.
- adas4044 3y agoThis is awesome!
- 1letterunixname 3y agoHahaha. I hate my work's insane 1:1 scheduling and flex meetings that throw themselves around. No one really wants to be the dick who cancels on everyone.
- pottertheotter 3y agoCan you elaborate more on what it’s like at your company?
- nyc_data_geek1 3y agoLove this idea
- jbotdev 3y agoAre people afraid of speaking out against meetings or declining them? I typically am upfront about when I think a meeting is not needed or when I’m not needed, and have no problem discussing it with my coworkers directly. Larger meetings like all-hands are different.. no way you’re getting every attendee to agree on canceling those, that’s more management politics.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> Are people afraid of speaking out against meetings or declining them? Depending on org culture, being direct about opting out of meetings can cast you in a negative light at best, or put your job at risk at worst. The better the culture is around creating safety to be direct and have agency to do so, the less likely these hacks are needed. I’m am very blunt with the dozen or so people who report up to me: if you don’t think you need to be in a meeting, say so, and drop me a message if I might have to defend the decision across the org or manage up. But all orgs are different along with their politics and quality of middle management.
- opportune 3y agoRight, in most cases it’s not worth it to burn a bridge by being the one person willing to speak up (especially when you can just go camera off and work on something else). There is a collective action problem where nobody wants to be the first to “defect” even if most do. And IME the useless meeting problem is pretty common when you have an ineffective manager who likes to “hold court” with as many cross team stakeholders as possible. You probably aren’t close enough to candidly tell them the meeting structure needs to change or just to cancel the recurring meeting, you need to be on their good terms because you work with them relatively often and ask favors of each other, the worst your or their team is doing the more you need the meeting as evidence of crossteam collaboration… At any company you’re going to end up with this problem, maybe at a startup its easier to communicate frankly and weed out the type of person who would do this, but I think it’s still quite possible for an otherwise good employee to make the mistake of creating inefficient meetings/processes where everyone is too nice or polite to give candid feedback.
- 3y ago
- asdfman123 3y agoThen at the end of the year, it should reveal who swipes right the most to be singled out for firing.
- hartator 3y agoHaha right. Even better, get the meeting setters.
- hartator 3y agoI think it’s more a management issue if you have to use this than a tooling issue - fire your PMs -, but I love the design.
- ftxbro 3y agoThis could be used for all kinds of unpleasant corporate decisions. Swipe to agree that someone's UI that they made is ugly. Swipe to vote undesirables out of the company.
- bigmattystyles 3y agoI think that would be counterproductive in the long term. Rather, I think, you have to have unpleasant conversations and force people to account for their decisions. I would just stress intellectual honesty, don't make things personal, just extreme objectivity and transparency where appropriate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty
- paxys 3y agoBetter idea would be for the company to get its act together and set the right culture and expectations for giving/receiving feedback. Shortcuts like these all cause more harm than they help.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Swipe to vote undesirables out of the company Reminds me of Athenian ostracism. I always thought we should have a write-in line on ballots where if more than a third of voters write one name, they’re banned from public office for ten years.
- knallfrosch 3y agoWith the US split as it is (40+/40+), both sides could banish people from the other side.
- blitzar 3y agoOr one side could attempt to banish people from the other side and instead hand power to the other side ...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
- animal-hash 3y agoDO NOT GIVE THIS ACCESS TO YOUR WORK EMAIL! DO YOU NOT GIVE THIS ACCESS TO YOUR WORK EMAIL! There is no source code, and it gets READ access to your meetings! Please do not make the error and give a non-vetted source access to your PRIVATE data!
- pkiv 3y agoThis is no different than using Reclaim.ai or Calendly with your work calendar. Obviously you should do your diligence with what software you give access to your calendar, but this likely isn't the first SaaS that has access these days...
- animal-hash 3y agoThe app wants you to mindlessly click through Google's access permissions without a second thought as to the impact of your actions. Flashy application with no contact information or legitimacy trying to access data. Your alarm bells should be going off at that point.
- klyrs 3y ago> Your alarm bells should be going off at that point. Whenever the erosion of privacy comes up, folks here point to regular folk being ambivalent until their identity is stolen. But even among the tech literate? Chill, don't worry, everybody is reading your work email!
- gumby 3y agoWith valuations down these days there's a great opportunity to do a rollup of spyware SaaS like these. It's the modern day equivalent of tossing USB sticks in the parking lot.
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoFWIW Calendly claims that they do not collect appointment contents, only the time and duration. They could, from a technical perspective, but their privacy policy states that they don't.
- bigmattystyles 3y agoSolved this for my former work by creating a meeting cost plugin - displaying - (time * corporate avg salary * participants). I should revive this. It's jarring when you see it. My other thought was to seek feedback for meetings automatically - close the app, ask how useful was this. Send monthly reports for the sake of anonymity.
- ghostpepper 3y agoHow do you do this without revealing salary information?
- bigmattystyles 3y agoAvg corp salary, not individual :-) - at the time I used Glassdoor data. (Or maybe I even just ballparked it?) Truth be told, it gets so expensive so fast, even with the entry level salary. Especially once you're over 2 participants. Really makes you think - would I pay this much for what I'm trying to solve here? And yes, it's not perfect, in fact, nothing is truly this reductive, but in lieu of a better metric...
- Closi 3y ago> Really makes you think - would I pay this much for what I'm trying to solve here? I think this is the potential subtle failure in this thought - it shouldn’t be if you would pay, it should be if the company would pay. And people will often dramatically under-estimate what a company will pay for something, particularly if it is a sunk-cost and not an ‘actual’ cost they will immediately realise.
- migf 3y agoBrilliant Nothing like the realization you're stuck somewhere pointless that costs $1500 an hour.
- TylerE 3y agoA very real (and morale boosting way) to put this into action would be to require anyone wishing to hold a meeting with more, than, say, 5 people present buy lunch for all attendees.
- gumby 3y agoAmazingly the idea of this came up at a party this week end (some drinking and much laughter was involved). And now HN shows that someone had apparently done it. Thanks theonlyriggs! But please stop snooping on my parties.
- m3kw9 3y agoWouldn’t everyone always swipe left if it’s anonymous?
- majormajor 3y agoClever idea. At a job a few years ago, managers and project owners were in the habit of canceling meetings last-minute if no agenda. In principal this was great - give people back time - but it was unfortunately unilateral and too late. Basically, if you don't see the Slack message about "hey, anyone have stuff for this meeting, if not I'll cancel" in the thirty minute window before the meeting, you didn't get a say - so in practice this meant the managers/project owners were the ones making the decisions and upward and sideways communication just didn't happen very frequently. E.g. if manager A has a standing meeting with individuals B, C, and D, and A individually was up to date on what all three of B, C and D were doing, A would cancel the meeting and B/C/D wouldn't be up to speed on what they were doing unless they all set up more individual meetings taking up more time than the original one "gave back." That was less of a problem in-office where others are likely to bump into each other anyway, but when things went remote it was isolating.
- wombat-man 3y agoIf it's a recurring meeting, you can attach a google doc or whatever to it in calendar with meeting notes/agenda. People can add to the agenda whenever, and if there's nothing on it the meeting can get cancelled.
- majormajor 3y agoI've always found this to be one of those "manager schedule/style" vs "engineer schedule/style" things. Hard blockers get added, but otherwise I've found ICs to be very hesitant about adding to the agenda. Especially when it's just "I want to know what's going on in the other teams/projects" because nobody wants to admit ignorance.
- bertil 3y agoThat tooling is helpful, but because of asymmetric dynamics, many individual contributors who have things on their minds don’t put things on that agenda. You have to work to make that agenda not “manager domain.” As a manager, I often reach out on the “opposite” day (Monday if the meeting is on a Thursday) and ask if there are things they want to talk about that are not already there. I also put things weeks ahead to give some sense of structure. Same for the team’s meeting agenda: people, especially senior team members, are more keen to edit that one, though. Often, I try to copy elements that they add to our 1:1 to discuss their concern ahead of time. When another team member raises a concern about another member, I ask them to tell them to add it to the agenda. That hasn’t worked, ever, but it highlights the role of that agenda as an asymetric way to handle the relations.
- darepublic 3y agoNow I will be wondering if I was the only one preventing the cancellation of an unpopular meeting
- blitzar 3y agoAnd if I actually chose cancel - I would spend the whole meeting wondering which so and so prevented the cancellation of this pointless meeting.
- carlosdp 3y agoGlad to see this idea actually built! People kept talking about wanting this on Twitter. Makes a lot of sense inside companies. Definitely wish I had it at some past employers that had certain regular sync meetings that were pretty useless. People tend not to want to point it out so as to not offend the manager who loves organizing them.
- re-thc 3y ago> People tend not to want to point it out so as to not offend the manager who loves organizing them. And so if the manager wants the meeting anyway this would not help at all.
- quickthrower2 3y agoTech free alternative: if you don't think the meeting is useful you don't have to attend. Since this app needs approval and getting everyone on board to use it, you can just do the same with the sentence above. It has the advantage that it will also reduce meetings that remain, as well as cancelling ones no one wants to attend.
- konschubert 3y agoHumans are not perfectly rational.
- travisgriggs 3y agoIt had be a pretty good meeting to be better than no meeting at all.
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoFor the panicked security operations people in the thread, this product comes from people working at Loom https://twitter.com/zackhargett/status/1653757448468193280 https://twitter.com/zackhargett/status/1653757448468193280 Zack Hargett & Paulius Dragunas
- vhiremath4 3y agoWorked* at a Loom. (co-founder of Loom here - they're good friends of mine)
- stevage 3y agoUrgh. I hate last minute meeting cancellations. If there's not much to talk about, I'd rather have a 5 minute chat, then go back to work, rather than cancel altogether. This also makes me realise how few interesting products are mentioned on HN lately.
- danlindley 3y agoThe example shows a user swiping left on Happy Hour drinks at 8pm? All work and no play, something something.
- ElfinTrousers 3y agoNone of your colleagues have kids? None are sober alcoholics?
- rich_sasha 3y agoIt still leaks information. A sneaky manager might swipe left just to see what happens, then write down on their shit list "employees lack commitment".
- tpoacher 3y agoDo yourself a favour and watch "Meetings Bloody Meetings" by John Cleese (I recommend the original one from the 70ies that can be found on the internet archive, not the remake on youtube, also by John Cleese). It's a funny 30min skit, well worth watching until the end, with a nice recap in the last 5 minutes. If you follow those guidelines, you will have productive meetings. In particular, with regard to this app, the meeting would have been cancelled way before any need to swipe, because the chairperson would have not scheduled it (or cancelled it if recurring) in the absence of any agenda items. Similarly, swiping without knowing the agenda seems unproductive. If there were real issues involved, you've simply postponed until nearer the deadline.
- okamiueru 3y agoFirst thing that strikes me is genuine alarm that something like that might be needed. It's just red flags all around. 1. If you have such a bad meeting culture in the office that you think something like this might ever be useful. Fix your meeting culture. 2. If "anonymous voting" is considered reasonable or necessary given the office culture. Fix your communication. Have 1-to-1 meetings were you can discuss things like too many meetings, etc. Maybe this is made as a joke, and if so, well done.
- onion2k 3y agoYou don't need an app like this. Just decline any meeting that doesn't have an agenda with a comment of "I don't think I'd bring any value to this meeting." If the meeting does have an agenda but doesn't have any goal decline it with a comment like "I don't have a strong opinion about the goal here, so I'm happy to accept whatever the outcome is." If there's an agenda and a goal then attend that one because you don't often get to see a mythical creature.
- albatrosstrophy 3y agoThis is obvious yet brilliant. I've been working for so long without realising that meetings are a process, not the end. I.e. they have to lead to something.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoHah, nice one. So far, I've managed to get some mileage out of RSVP-ing as "tentative", with a comment that boils down to "how about you add some agenda to the meeting invite, because at this point I kind of don't know WTF is this about and why am I even on the invitee list?". I haven't thought of treating a goal of the meeting as distinct thing from the agenda. I'll try it next time, whenever it comes - for some reason, I seem to not get all that many meeting invites anymore ;).
- _ph_ 3y agoWell, it is a bit more complex. There are meetings which you don't think they are absolutely necessary, but if they take place, you want to attend. To have an invisible flag to signal that you rather would skip the meeting sounds like a good middle ground to cancel meetings no one feels strongly about but is afraid to cancel.
- PoignardAzur 3y agoThat doesn't work if you're feeling insecure about your job security, want to avoid looking like a slacker, don't want to offend your colleagues, etc. And yeah, you can toughen up and decline anyway despite all that, but processes should be based on giving employees the right incentives, not hoping they toughen up. (See also, blameless post-mortems.)
- digitalsushi 3y agoIf Microsoft brings osascript back for Outlook on Mac, I'm going to write a local script that does the same thing. Pick some threshold, >50% rejection, meeting is canceled.
- ulizzle 3y agoI'm pretty sure your manager won't like you swiping left on the 1:1. Weird example.
- mikebonnell 3y agoIs there a valid link for their terms of use? "Details regarding Cala dispute resolution process are available in the Cala Terms of Use." But Cala Terms of Use doesn't link to anything and /terms doesn't load...