You’re WASTING Everybody’s TIME In Meetings! ⏳

Have your team meetings gone wrong? Are your meetings a waste of time? Join Aino Corry for a short pain relief for meetings, both the one you attend, and the ones you lead.
Studies show that around 50% of time spent in meetings is a waste of time. This is not an effective way of maintaining employee engagement. How do we stop wasting time in team meetings? How do we run a team meeting to maximise engagement and efficiency?
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[@avavaviv1]

And remember, at the end of a meeting, say something shocking like "meetings are like sex", to raise attention and make the meeting memorable.

[@dougr550]

"We will continue to have meetings until we understand why no work is getting done." - Management

[@ainocorry3004]

Sad, but often heard

[@korsmakolnikov]

Best answer ever

[@istovall2624]

Different people hate different types of meetings for different reasons. GOLDEN.

[@maxlutz3674]

Yes. The importance of this fact is severly underrated though. People tend to not understand that the could improve my meeting experience by not inviting me when I have no dog in the fight.

[@mesopotamianmessenger5830]

This video should be used as a fundamental piece of training for people in any industry.

[@orange-vlcybpd2]

My problem with the group meetings is, that there is only a chance that you will receive the piece of information, which is relevant for you. When i would ask directly i would get exactly the information i need. Peer-to-peer communication is more effective than broadcasting energy-wise.

[@ainocorry3004]

the more people, the less efficient. Sometimes, but only sometimes, you will need a lot of brains and eyes at the same time.

[@mosheivry7090]

Absolutely! The utility in such meetings is very low when the cost of wasting time is high.

[@animanaut]

well, you can use meetings in unconventional ways too. try setting up a meeting with youself for some uninterrupted "me" time 😂 my calendar is not fair game

[@TheScottShepard]

I’m a dev lead and scrum master. Making meetings productive is a psy-ops exercise. Pointing out the cost is a powerful tool if folks don’t take the hint to move on and keep things valuable. Finding the right people for meetings and cascading information to those that need it, summarizing action items and main takeaways are also important. Sometimes I see design meetings without designers and engineering meetings without engineers. If you won’t be contributing to the discussion, then you are probably just a distraction. Good topic. Thanks for the lesson!

[@MilMike]

I hate meetings too. Especially the ones in the morning. Sometimes I have meetings from 9 to 12 or even onger and after the meetings I am supposed to work but then I am tired -.-

[@istovall2624]

Omg yea! Drain all your energy and motivation first thing in the morning with your standup going over by 2 hours. Then they follow up with "why isn't xyz getting done" and have to have a meeting on that.

[@errrzarrr]

THIS! I don't know why, but meetings drain energy for the rest of the day. It might take only 1hr but you are drained for 4hrs long. On top of that, they love to take the most productive hours of the day for meetings and the day is gone!

[@_Mentat]

14 hrs 15 mins of meetings this week. Just a typical week. I'm a dev and I find the most useful meetings are with 1-2 other devs and likely to be 5 mins long. The big wasters have product management and marketing in them; then it's hours of waffle.

[@MrC0MPUT3R]

I spent 11.8 hours in meetings. Almost all of them were product management meetings.

[@salvatoreshiggerino6810]

And for some reason management and marketing love talking about technical solutions and hate talking about business constraints. The exact opposite of what devs need to do their job.

[@robharrison9927]

Is it possible to just not go? Or to get called in when they really need you?

[@brownhorsesoftware3605]

Welcome! Meetings are an art that few ever master. At the job of my dreams we had a weekly meeting where any topic requiring more than 90 seconds was addressed in another meeting that you used your 90 seconds to organize. There were no managers in that company and everyone managed just fine.

[@Dischoir]

I will definitely tell my active thinker, plenary loving, no timeline respecting colleague that i will in future meetings with him leave the meeting whilst quoting your sex analogy :)

[@ainocorry3004]

Please do!😄

[@enolive123]

Since I started to apply the rule of 2 feet from barcamps to every meeting, It got much more comfortable and I rarely get invited to useless meetings anymore ;-)

[@errrzarrr]

How that works

[@PereViader]

Another host! Happy to have you share more knowledge with us

[@dougr550]

While there is some very good advice here on how to have better meetings, it seems worth calling out that in most cases having too many, or bad meetings is usually a symptom that the underlying process is broken. Too many meetings: You're probably working on too many different things. Are developers working on multiple different initiatives at the same time or even worse working across multiple teams? There is absolutely no good excuse for this and it's poor management. Under resourcing projects is the #1 reason why they fail! Even PMI knows that. Bad meetings: Usually indicates an issue either with the intake/planning process, or poorly scoped projects. Lack of process and stream aligned business manager roles (product owners) results in an insane meeting burden just trying to keep track of what work is in flight. Allowing poorly scoped projects to move forward results in terrible meetings because we don't understand the problem we're trying to solve. To quote SAFe "the people are doing the best they can, it's the process that's the problem."

[@ainocorry3004]

True. It is often a symptom and not the real problem.

[@muntashirbinsolaiman9976]

Welcome to the new host.

[@jkadoodle]

She looks like Dave’s sister

[@ainocorry3004]

Thank you:)

[@jaaguitar]

A meeting getting cancelled/postponed is one of the most joyous things in life.

[@Flamechr]

10 times 15 min daily scrum. 1 hour review 1 hour retrospectiv 1 hour planning In a 2 weeks work. But some times pm and department managers put ekstra stuff in 😔

[@georgehelyar]

This, but with 15 minutes of team free chat before daily team meeting, which is great for team bonding when working remotely, and a weekly 1h backlog refinement (aka grooming). Also our daily "scrum" or "stand up" is done in walk the board style where we discuss the active stories rather than pointless status reporting what each person did on each day.

[@AmandaVieiraMamaesouCult]

Honestly, that does seem like a normal amount of meetings.

[@mrsincere4640]

This lady hit the nail on the head

[@csorbazoli]

Thanks for this great video I realized that I am a reflective thinker

[@user-bm6rt1jk3v]

Great insights! I will definetly try to put them into practice

[@ainocorry3004]

Thank you Carla:)

[@disgruntledtoons]

For a moment I thought Dave had transitioned. In all seriousness, the cost of a meeting increases by at least the square of the number of people present. It consumes the time of everybody present (so it's at least linear), and the length of the meeting increases with the number of people present (so it becomes at least quadratic). And I bet some people talk more in larger groups than smaller groups, so the scaling is probably between quadratic and cubic.

[@dougr550]

I think people need to be careful about measuring the cost of meetings as it can lead to some pretty dangerous conclusions. Meetings are a way of resolving uncertainty between people. The meetings aren't the problem, the uncertainty is.

[@errrzarrr]

and drains energy and motivation for the rest of the day in a 2× shape. For instance, a 1hr meeting drains you for the rest 2hrs. 2hrs meeting gets you drained for the upcoming 4hrs. So a 1hr meeting is like having 3hr of non-work and feeling dead

[@sarahwbs]

The other day I was in an hour long knowledge transfer meeting (a weekly meeting, mind you) that had *65* participants 😱

[@edgeeffect]

Good choice for subject for your first solo appearance. :)

[@ismaelgrahms]

Dave’s legacy ❤❤❤❤

[@danielvalverde4955]

Great insight, can't wait to learn more from our new host.

[@chimchim2_]

Loved the sex analogy

[@googleaccount5225]

Some good treasures in this video.

[@redwrath5]

I wish my boss would let me just leave meetings Im not needed in without sounding like they are disappointed in me

[@theguardianarchives433]

This

[@baddolphin1423]

Everything comes down to bad management. Bad management (and bad managers) is made possible by the elimination of that free-market solution: bankruptcy. Bankruptcy leads to unemployment (usually the managers go last) and you can't have that in a democracy. So you get bailouts, subsidies, too-big-to-fail, 0% interest loans and other "sedatives" to numb that free-market pain. Bottom line: eliminating the punishment (the pain) validates bad behaviors. Very visible in management these days. In the end, the consumer pays the price. As an employee you can always snooze through the meeting (quiet quit).

[@jimhumelsine9187]

I was in a massive requirement review meeting with about 40 people. It was expensive because many had to travel across the country to be there, including me. I remember one fond hour where all 40 of us sat in the room while two of the head people argued for an hour whether the punctuation for one requirement should have been a colon or a semi-colon.

[@BryonLape]

Wow...they are not used in a similar fashion. Should have taken 20 seconds.

[@c00ckiez]

This sounds ridiculously exaggerated.

[@dougr550]

@@c00ckiez completely unbelievable but not the least bit surprising. I could see that happening where I work, although they'd find something infinitely more bizarre and irrelevant to argue about.

[@dougr550]

Flying people around the country to have terrible meetings is a special form of waste :) I do love all day meetings with large groups though, especially when they have absolutely no impact whatsoever on the work getting done.

[@bleki_one]

Not sure if that was the aim of the video but TIL that I can play recording of a meeting to look busy LOL. I agree that meetings are valuable. But as many other things in the industry they are broken. The problem, again, is in organisation culture and we as individuals have difficult time to change that. At least that is my experience as mid level employee.

[@errrzarrr]

Meetings are decreasingly valuable. This is, the longer they span the less valuable they are. The more people present, the less valuable they are. The more meetings the team have in a month, the less valuable they are.

[@rursus8354]

A meeting should be a short round-robin if it is just about status reporting relevant to the participants. A continuation could be opened afterwards if anything serious occurs. Any other meating should have a clearly defined purpose and an (extensible) agenda and participants should be called only if they are an interested party. The agenda points should all be prepared by new information, or else they should be summarily skipped. The participants should stay on topic and not repeat statements. There should be a recording secretary and a president that keeps order. The methodology has been known since at least the 19th century.

[@okerror1451]

yay Aino \o/ - straight shooting.

[@informationcounter1983]

My project manager schedule many meetings and end of the day says he didn't understand what's going on so I should send email to client. what a pathetic guy. now a days customer bypass him and talks to me directly.

[@ainocorry3004]

I feel sorry for your manager....

[@AK-vx4dy]

Very nice to hear you Anio :) Are you spending much time with Dave? I hear some inspiration in speech... intonation of "are" etc. ;)

[@ainocorry3004]

Not really:) we meet 2 times a year on average.

[@AK-vx4dy]

@@ainocorry3004 Sorry I misspelled your name :(

[@ainocorry3004]

@@AK-vx4dy no worries:)

[@errrzarrr]

What's the point of attending meeting to *NOT* discuss matters on detail and considered bad manners so they get called to discuss separately?😢

[@ainocorry3004]

Good question. To get a quick. shared overview.

[@Nerdsown]

I have always found email to be the worst form of communication. The history is confusing. The discussion spans days or weeks, meaning you're constantly having to remember what the email chain was about. More time has to be put into articulating less content than you can by just saying something.

[@qj0n]

Yes, but the biggest issue with e-mail is the way of choosing recipients. All successors of e-mail (like Teams or Slack) organize discussion around topics in channels. This way sender decide which topic it touches and it's the recipient's decision, which channels to observe. In e-mails, sender is responsible to choose recipients and usually cost of not informing interested party is bigger than receiving unnecessary e-mail, so it's safer to add everyone to the conversation

[@errrzarrr]

We have corporate chatting apps now like Teams, Slack... there's no excuse

[@raticus79]

I'm looking forward to hearing more from Aino about cognitive load theory and experiential learning. I'm trying to learn Category Theory and I think it's an area that could benefit from more material that applies modern teaching methods to facilitate learning. I applaud Bartosz Milewski's efforts here but think he could use some help with demonstrating the practical value of understanding these fundamentals of composability. Maybe that could be a good focus topic for a future video from Aino on how to learn.

[@ainocorry3004]

Good idea! Thank you

[@raticus79]

@@ainocorry3004 You're welcome. Framing learning goals as "competence goals" in your engineering room talk was helpful - I could see that's really what he was missing in his instruction, "here's what you will be able to see, understand, explain and do". He has some exercises after each chapter but even those are missing a motivating context. There's an older hacker news thread on "an invitation to category theory" that has good review of sources available at the time.

[@ainocorry3004]

@@raticus79 I will do my best. It might take some time, though, because I am not sure I am finished talked about broken meetings :-)

[@raticus79]

@@ainocorry3004 oh sure, no rush, I have enough to get started already

[@BryonLape]

It all starts with Scrum or SAFe and never ends.

[@qj0n]

It's usually not starting with "just Scrum", but with adding Scrum on top of another process, so that you end up with two sets of meetings ;)

[@mrspecs4430]

Im ohnestly a bit confused. Aino has the same mannerism, body language and speaking patterns as Dave up to the duration of pauses, looking away from the camera for formulating the next sentence. Stumbling about pronunciations. It all matches.. What's happening here?

[@MartinMaat]

I also figured she could be his sister or an AI. But I googled her, it turns out she is a speaker on meta-software development issues.

[@coderider3022]

Someone in broadcast mode and bringing subordinates to get forced consent. My meetings go like the film ‘Death of Stalin’ , u……………..nanimous !

[@mrsincere4640]

Count how many times she said beatings. Lol.😂

[@danielwilkowski5899]

Holy moly, that's a female Dave :o

[@denisblack9897]

That’s why I go back to sleep after a meeting, not cause I’m a lazy ass mofo

[@rentefald]

I can see some genetic here :)

[@BryonLape]

Replace meetings with e-mail? Absolutely wrong. E-mail is a sign of a broken process.

[@JonasKongslund]

Aino mentioned status meetings as an example where an email may be sufficient.

[@ainocorry3004]

@@JonasKongslund Exactly, thank you

[@jangohemmes352]

How is that wrong? I'd say an unnecessary meeting is heaps worse than an unnecessary email? Emails aren't bad in and of themselves, even though I agree with the sentiment. That's too black and white. Emails are at the very least not as bad as meetings, just because of the sheer amount of extra time wasted

[@MartinMaat]

You are in management, aren't you?

[@thebigsteiny]

1:30 In the immortal words of Ron Swanson, don't half ass two things. Whole-ass one thing. media.tenor.com/ddvgmJa1QjYAAAAd/parks-and-rec-ron-swanson.gif