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> Q : What kinds of work could potentially be dropped to increase productivity? A: Meetings This is really lazy and boring. Yes, many meetings are a waste of t

> Q : What kinds of work could potentially be dropped to increase productivity? A: Meetings This is really lazy and boring. Yes, many meetings are a waste of time, but I don't think you're productively cutting out an entire day of work out of the week by just cutting meetings. It's also very difficult for organizations to understand which meetings are "pointless" or could be re-arranged, or we wouldn't have the problem in the first place. A past company I worked for tried a global initiative to reduce the amount of time, particularly engineers, spent in meetings. They mandated no more than 20% of your week could be spent in meetings. The effect was instead that things that needed to be meetings ended up happening in a myriad of side-chats and personal messages, making things way more time consuming in the end. Sometimes getting everyone together in a room or call to agree on a course of action is needed. If you want to cut time out of those, cut the political BS out of them aggressively and call people out for grandstanding or wasting time in meetings.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
Also if it was so easy to cut out meetings, why wouldn't companies have done it already and get that extra productivity with 5 days. At my current work it's already quite difficult to find available slots to fit everyone in, I feel like it would be worse with 4 days. Also probably how meetings are used can vary wildly from one company to another.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  Yea, to me, it needs to be a top down cultural thing, every meeting needs someone actively "quarterbacking" it and needs to be aggressively steering the meeting back on topic. There needs to be a culture of, "If I have nothing to contribute to this meeting, I do not attend or I will leave." Meetings need to be scheduled for an hour with the goal of finishing after 30 minutes, and if there's "extra time" you are simply done. Things like that. The problem to me isn't the number of meetings or the meetings themselves, just how many unnecessary parties get added to them or how much time is wasted in them by having no one actively leading/steering the conversation (which absolutely no one wants to do, especially in cross-functional meetings where there is no clear lead)
  - kevinventullo 2y ago
    I would also add the instinct of making meetings recurring, and then never reevaluating whether that meeting is still needed at the same cadence or even at all. As an EM in big tech I am guilty of creating my fair share of meetings, but I do my best to cancel or turn down their cadence once they’re no longer useful.

mewpmewp2 2y ago

Also if it was so easy to cut out meetings, why wouldn't companies have done it already and get that extra productivity with 5 days. At my current work it's already quite difficult to find available slots to fit everyone in, I feel like it would be worse with 4 days. Also probably how meetings are used can vary wildly from one company to another.

JohnMakin 2y ago
Yea, to me, it needs to be a top down cultural thing, every meeting needs someone actively "quarterbacking" it and needs to be aggressively steering the meeting back on topic. There needs to be a culture of, "If I have nothing to contribute to this meeting, I do not attend or I will leave." Meetings need to be scheduled for an hour with the goal of finishing after 30 minutes, and if there's "extra time" you are simply done. Things like that. The problem to me isn't the number of meetings or the meetings themselves, just how many unnecessary parties get added to them or how much time is wasted in them by having no one actively leading/steering the conversation (which absolutely no one wants to do, especially in cross-functional meetings where there is no clear lead)
- kevinventullo 2y ago
  I would also add the instinct of making meetings recurring, and then never reevaluating whether that meeting is still needed at the same cadence or even at all. As an EM in big tech I am guilty of creating my fair share of meetings, but I do my best to cancel or turn down their cadence once they’re no longer useful.