[HN Gopher] How to Attend Meetings - Internal guidelines from th...
___________________________________________________________________
How to Attend Meetings - Internal guidelines from the New York
Times
Author : spagoop
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-12-01 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.google.com)
| folkhack wrote:
| Love these slides, hard agree on _all_ points. But, be absolutely
| certain on the culture before you start declining meetings, even
| if for valid reasons like outlined in this presentation.
| Declining meetings can be seen as a negative, "not a team
| player", thing... and, I really have to be certain on my
| leadership, the company, and the context before I push back on
| someone wanting my time. Even if their request for my time was
| arbitrary, or useless.
| jf wrote:
| I think that's why the document had some suggested pushback to
| meeting invites (e.g. "what's the agenda so I can prepare")
| folkhack wrote:
| Yep! And, I send that exact message/email all the time in
| good faith. But, even with that - if someone just wants to
| talk, trying to nail them down on a topic can be _seen_ as
| obstructive, even though it's productive. Unfortunately, lots
| of people who schedule meetings just want to talk with not
| much outcome.
|
| I'm being pedantic, but my experienced inverse of these
| slides is that meetings are the "social" part of work. It
| really really depends on the company, the leadership, the
| people. But, sometimes - it's more in your professional
| interest to talk about + market the work vs. actually doing
| it.
|
| Ultimately, we agree :)
| jf wrote:
| As somone who vigorously declines meetings, this gave me some
| extra criteria to use (estimated speaking time per attendee)
|
| What I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having
| agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every
| meeting that I schedule.
| jmkd wrote:
| Should be a doc on the harder skill of how to schedule meetings,
| then you wouldn't need a guide on how to attend them.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Educating people on how to schedule meetings requires that
| everyone else have the skill for you to benefit. Educating
| people on how to attend meetings only requires that you have
| the skill for you to benefit.
| bbarn wrote:
| I think the cultural norm of a stance like this for attendees
| will condition people over time to follow the opposite side of
| things.
| garciasn wrote:
| I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I
| do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked
| for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending
| meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got
| it.
|
| ---
|
| For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for
| clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
| that we have solid outcomes. None of which are followed nor what
| anyone else wants.
|
| Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my
| team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar
| (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid
| support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did,
| 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
| folkhack wrote:
| Often, corporate culture is more about maintaining status-quo
| vs. actually achieving or organizing efforts. People often just
| want to hear themselves talk, stroke their ego, and
| position/politic. As an IC/leader/owner this can be _so_
| annoying.
|
| Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of
| places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent
| team.
| dasil003 wrote:
| That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some
| unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand,
| you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers
| viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are
| doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage
| their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting
| (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback should be
| given 1-1), but rest assured plenty of folks understand and
| will not hold it against you if you vote with your attendance.
| garciasn wrote:
| I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of
| thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees.
| There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone
| declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to
| the ideals this presentation outlines.
|
| Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely
| awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.
| maxerickson wrote:
| In a functional organization, it's almost certainly going
| to be absurd to argue that you can't provide value to any
| of the meetings that you are invited to.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I can provide value to any meeting that I'm invited to.
| That doesn't mean it's the most valuable thing I can do
| with my time (especially given how tragically frustrating
| most of them are).
| jpadkins wrote:
| Intel in the 90s-2000s did. I did customer research on them
| (worked on powerpoint at the time). I was amazed that the
| CEO gave a mandate to the company that if an agenda was not
| posted to a meeting 24H before the meeting, you did not
| have to attend that meeting. They also had other crazy
| strict meeting rules that I forgot.
| grvdrm wrote:
| > There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone
| declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to
| the ideals this presentation outlines.
|
| Exactly. Love the deck. Like you, agree with many things.
|
| My similar suggestions (but a little looser):
|
| 1. Long meetings need agendas. But don't expect perfection.
| You can get away with no agenda in a short (30 or less)
| meeting.
|
| 2. Very large meetings need a DRIVER (person). I hate a big
| meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to
| bring something up" - no no no. I don't want free-form
| conversation in a large meeting. I want someone to drive
| the hell out of the meeting. Keep people in check!
|
| Most important:
|
| 3. Do what you can to discover the underlying motivation of
| the meeting organizer and solve their motivation some other
| way. Recently sat through a disastrous JIRA-focused
| meeting. Talking about tickets, their purpose, their
| descriptions, etc. But I knew the person needed the data
| for executive-team reporting. So I offered to help fill in
| gaps (without a call) to improve their reporting. I saved
| myself future time, he got better reporting - a win.
|
| Constant and outright decline behavior will probably
| backfire.
| rafterydj wrote:
| Wow, I might need to steal that idea for bypassing Jira
| discussions. I hate Jira with all my might.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Please do. It works!
|
| I don't think most folks are both interested and trying
| to sit in mindless meetings (like my JIRA example).
|
| That JIRA example is particularly annoying. It's a
| product team (with an external consultant) using JIRA to
| track progress. But like anything with a reporting
| component, people are now optimizing toward what's
| reported - not toward real work. Success in a week (or
| sprint) is number of tickets closed not whether anything
| actually happened.
|
| I declined several of these JIRA update meetings. At
| least two invites popped onto my calendar as agenda-less
| hour-long blocks.
|
| Then I joined one, asked all the questions around
| purpose, and suggested what I would do to help with less
| overall effort and a reduction in pesky meeting invites.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > I hate a big meeting when someone says something like
| "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no.
|
| This makes the meeting end really quick when nobody has
| anything to discuss right? For some people the only way
| you are ever going to get them to bring something up is
| by asking in a meeting.
| grvdrm wrote:
| That no one has anything almost never happens.
|
| I support the idea of bringing something to table.
| Instead maybe ask for simple 1-sentence ideas over email
| (or chat/etc.) in advance and then you use those as the
| driver of the meeting.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _wasn 't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone
| declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to
| the ideals this presentation outlines_
|
| Well yes, if the culture doesn't allow it then it's not
| going to happen. That doesn't mean those cultures don't
| exist or that they can't be created, even if just in a
| pocket
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I've had one manager over 10 jobs spanning 40 years that was
| on board with this
| jon-wood wrote:
| I've had multiple managers over many jobs who've said they
| were on board with this. I've had CEOs saying from the top
| down "decline meetings without an agenda", and yet somehow
| it never changes.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > empower individuals
|
| _Eye roll_
|
| How to detect a "leader".
| kortilla wrote:
| It's corporate jargon, but it has a meaning - autonomy. If
| you're in the "eye roll" camp you're gonna max out on your
| potential pretty early.
| amanzi wrote:
| Yeah, in my experience "attending" a meeting is almost never a
| choice. I think a better slide title would have been
| "Scheduling a meeting is a choice". I see so many meetings are
| created (with a default time slot of 30 minutes), for what
| could have been a 5 or 10 minute phone call or even just a
| quick email.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Yea like having 20 people on a project update call may be a
| poor of their time, but for boss man it's a great use -
| everyone he needs in the same room! Don't need to chase anyone
| down and someone can chime in if something inaccurate is said
|
| Way too much upside for this kind of "low value" meeting to
| disappear
| drums8787 wrote:
| This is a big piece of what drove me out of corp jobs.
|
| With a sufficient hourly rate people are less likely to have
| you waste time in meetings.
|
| Or maybe I've just been lucky. Prob doesn't work everywhere.
| parliament32 wrote:
| > I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked
| for, none of this is going to fly.
|
| My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally
| having enough clout to just say "no".
|
| > I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for
| clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
|
| Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me
| know when one has been posted." in your decline message. Do you
| sound like a dick? Yes. Does it work? Also yes, unless you
| weren't actually required in that meeting, in which case it
| becomes a self-solving problem.
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you
| have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
|
| Sometimes it's not just about whether others think you should
| be there.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which
| you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the
| meeting.
|
| Unless your head is on the line, why do you care?
| delusional wrote:
| Because caring about your work, the people around you,
| and the quite frankly stuff in general is healthy and
| gives life meaning.
|
| If you go somewhere 8 hours a day, you'd like that place
| to matter to you. Anything else is just depressing.
| munk-a wrote:
| You are correct that caring is important - but it also
| isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you
| don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you
| up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing
| it wrong.
|
| Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time
| commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you
| need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either
| extreme and, especially folks that are naturally
| empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap
| of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally
| for it.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and
| they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't
| be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility,
| it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
|
| IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human
| communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some
| point you'll need to compromise.
|
| Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to
| them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take
| time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly
| uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very
| good points, you'll probably bear with it.
| kortilla wrote:
| As a manager or even a technical leader, your head IS on
| the line, it just might not seem so obvious.
|
| Rollout delays, customer debacles, etc all shape your
| image to promo panels.
|
| If you're just a junior engineer, it's not like it will
| be held against you, but you certainly missed an
| opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for
| yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren't NPCs.
| somanyphotons wrote:
| Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being
| unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
| icedchai wrote:
| Some people want the projects they're involved with to
| actually be successful?
| maccard wrote:
| I echo the parents sentiment - I don't need to be there for
| a one hour meeting while 12 people give a perspective on a
| topic, but if you make the wrong decision I will say no.
|
| My job as a higher level manager is to ensure that whoever
| is there on our behalf avoids stupid decisions being made,
| and if I can't delegate that then I need to go myself.
| Sometimes its unavoidable, and sometimes politics prevail
| but 95% of the time making my priorities clear to my team
| and being consistent in my them has the correct outcome.
| parliament32 wrote:
| [delayed]
| munk-a wrote:
| > Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let
| me know when one has been posted." in your decline message.
|
| If you have a good manager you can often CC them or quote
| them in your response as well "Sorry, I'm busy with project
| work and Sarah wants me to stay focused to hit our deadlines.
| If we're going to need to budget time outside of it I'll need
| a clear agenda to offer as a rationale to my stakeholders."
|
| I think it really helps to sell this if you've got casual
| impromptu voice calls as a norm in the company. If it was
| really just a quick thing then throw up a hangout for us to
| chat - if it's worth scheduling a meeting for it's certainly
| worth actually putting together an agenda.
|
| As an aside - my company recentlyish switched from google to
| ms for calendar management and (among many things MS is
| terrible at) the fact that agendas aren't immediately visible
| in meetings on your calendar is the absolute worst UX
| decision.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I assume this works nice to get you out of any meeting they
| didn't want you to attend, but couldn't just remove you from.
|
| If they plan to move resources out of your team but need
| highers approval, having a meeting that you refused to attend
| sounds like a good first step. You might be there on the next
| one, but the terrain is already prepared. And as it's a
| sensitive subject, a vague agenda would also be natural
| enough.
| baxtr wrote:
| AFAIK amazon is a rare exception.
| watwut wrote:
| > "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a
| choice; got it.
|
| It is completely valid to say "no" to meeting in our company.
| Not to all of them, but to most. Or to ask "Do I have to be
| here? Why was I invited, it seems out of my scope" and move
| from there. I see people doing that and I was doing that.
| xnx wrote:
| I'd also add that if nothing was written down (and ideally sent
| to participants afterward), the meeting was a waste of time.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Had an idea
|
| These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go
| and forget the rules.
|
| So...
|
| What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you
| accept you get a reminder of the rules.
|
| People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so
| that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| I'm somewhat convinced this is already a thing. It would
| explain some of the meeting notices I get.
| shoo wrote:
| > Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of
| the rules.
|
| Like phishing training, but for meeting attendance. Fail the
| test and accept a decoy meeting and you must complete a round
| of mandatory training in how to distinguish a useless meeting
| from one that is worth attending.
|
| I wonder if enterprises would buy this? Phishing training
| companies make a living.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if
| you accept you get a reminder of the rules.
|
| What could this possibly accomplish? I accept meeting requests
| not because I have some perverse desire to waste my time (and
| everyone else's), but because when I fail to show up for
| meetings (as has happened, quite by accident), I get shit for
| it. The eastern European folks are constantly setting meetings
| before 8am, but they can't just set them and leave them there.
| They'd delete these, put them at another time, but forget to
| include my name in the list... and then my boss starts giving
| me hell for why I'm not showing up to them. Yeh, I love getting
| up at 5:30am just so I can psychically deduce that you're all
| in an early morning meet.
|
| So now you'd want to spam up my inbox with 15% more meetings,
| but I have to guess which of these imbecilic invitations are
| the real ones, and to taunt me if I can't always tell? I'm not
| the problem here, punishing me can't improve this for anyone.
| tyre wrote:
| When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs
| to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way
| to get quality heads down time.
|
| All of them were titled something like "$X WG" where X was what
| we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for "Working Group".
|
| We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she
| would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.
| hoherd wrote:
| I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring
| blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time"
| so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those
| blocks may not result in my attendance.
| tyre wrote:
| I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(
| magneticnorth wrote:
| YMMV whether this will fly in your company culture, but I
| titled mine "Focus time, please ask before scheduling".
|
| And when people inevitably didn't ask, I'd just decline
| unless I especially wanted to attend. I find myself
| getting invited to meetings sometimes just because the
| organizer wants to be inclusive and make sure everyone is
| looped in who might want to be, and I figure that's
| what's going on if they added me without asking.
|
| If it's really important for me to be there, they'll see
| my time block and ask me.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Your boss
|
| That requires your boss to be good at meetings, and in
| particular to take extra care of preparing meetings with well
| crafted agendas and not just setting up random spots where they
| spend the first 5min remembering the actually ultra important
| thing they needed to discuss with you.
|
| I've never seen an org where that applies to most higher ups.
| In particular for stuff they don't want to leave in writing or
| are delicate subjects.
| smallnix wrote:
| The flow diagram for yes/no attend meeting is missing to weigh
| the estimated impact you can make against other meetings.
|
| Even if I can contribute real value to 20 meetings which I am
| invited to, I can't attend all of them.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Does underrate discussion. Larger shifts in strategy require
| iterated discussion and consensus formation. Not every meeting is
| this, nor should it be, but this is something that is
| underrepresented and under respected.
| potatoproduct wrote:
| I would like to skip most of my meetings, but it would likely
| damage most of my working relationships.
| arjie wrote:
| I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of
| recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would
| have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers
| annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM
| summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of
| meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-
| risk capturer.
|
| e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then
| even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles)
| that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making
| process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or
| the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and
| that they did so for good reasons.
|
| In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the
| discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we
| could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an
| automatic way of handling them.
|
| I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people
| dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of
| team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit
| culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational
| transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a
| position again.
| wswope wrote:
| Whisper-X does speaker-annotated transcripts nicely. I've used
| it for running multi-hour TTRPG sessions with friends and it
| worked hassle-free after setup.
|
| https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
| igor47 wrote:
| I also do this with my ttrpg games!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Check out Parakeet as well , faster and more accurate in my
| experience
| arjie wrote:
| Terrific. Thank you!
| 0x3f wrote:
| This seems like it might have the second order effect of
| increasing meeting volume, though, until the equilibrium point
| of it not actually reducing your workload.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Where did this come from? Source? Date (2024?)
|
| Brian doesn't work at NYT anymore I don't think
| gxt wrote:
| There's John Cleese's Meetings Bloody Meetings for good meeting
| hygiene training. Its entertaining and educational.
|
| https://archive.org/details/meetingsbloodymeetings
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to
| receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes,
| sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages --
| but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear
| others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are
| feeling directly.
|
| This seems to be missed by the author.
| solatic wrote:
| Using meetings to sync on status is an anti-pattern. Questions
| can be asked in tickets and shared documents. True feelings are
| rarely shared in large forums anyway and are only reliably
| shared in private 1:1 sessions.
| TheSockStealer wrote:
| Everyone having a common understanding of the state of the
| world is important and not always efficient, or even
| possible, to do it async. Ideally, everyone would have good
| response times on messages and emails, always write clearly,
| but this is the real world, and you can't guarantee that.
| Often, tickets bounce back and forth between people for weeks
| when a quick meeting will answer things quickly. Sometimes
| this is best to happen in Status meetings IMO.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose
| is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress,
| etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or
| messages -- but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or
| even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how
| people are feeling directly.
|
| No, there are none. Whoever does those needs to check their
| fucking ego and just send an email/update md file like a normal
| human.
| bartread wrote:
| Interesting that "Small - Brainstorming" is marked as a bad
| meeting flavour.
|
| I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming
| anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can
| come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've
| worked with are like this.
|
| But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely _must_ brainstorm then
| "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like
| way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many
| other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when
| any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a
| brainstorming meeting.
|
| Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse.
|
| Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and
| practice most of it as well.
| Typescripter wrote:
| This was great!
| next_xibalba wrote:
| "Small brainstorming" is a bad meeting flavor? Not sure I agree
| with that. I find that brainstorming meetings with >3 people turn
| into trainwrecks.
|
| Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company
| that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I
| presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need
| some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take
| hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time
| waste for most companies.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Could NYT also produce two more guides?
|
| 1. How To Use Teams/Slack/Etc.
|
| 2. How To Use Email
|
| Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my
| entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start
| messages saying "hi" with no follow-up.
|
| Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line
| emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make
| email intentional and high-value.
|
| Point being: if any one of (1) email, or (2) chat, or (3)
| meetings is not working well, I bet you have problems in either
| or both of the others.
| ponector wrote:
| There is no sense to send email with several points/questions.
| People select two of ten point to answer conveniently ignoring
| the rest.
| gabeh wrote:
| I remember Merlin Mann, of "Inbox Zero" fame, coming to Twitter
| to talk about improving meetings around 2010. His list was a
| superset of this and forever shaped my approach to meetings. The
| change management part of fixing this behavior is a much heavier
| lift than you might expect. These are behaviors that are
| engrained well before the current environment.
| dandano wrote:
| These are fantastic! I've done similar and seen some positive
| outcomes at work. As the one usually sending meetings - I have
| been leaning heavily on asynchronous first (teams chat) then if
| needed we hop into a focused meeting with a clear agenda. It's
| been liberating to see the reactions that other people like this
| too instead of another meeting. More often than not we never
| needed the meeting.
| oconaros wrote:
| Change management is the issue, not meeting management. I worked
| for an agency who hired productivity consultants[1] to help with
| meetings, email, and time management. I thought it was a very
| courageous choice. It's extremely hard to measure the impact of
| this type of engagement, and some people hated it. The system was
| good though.
|
| I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I've tried many
| productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that
| stuck (other than GTD).
|
| Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a
| stan
|
| [1] https://doublegemini.com/
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