I hate useless meetings, but they're the only way I can get dedicated attention from some coworkers. I'd absolutely prefer that the meeting was a message on Slack or Teams, but certain coworkers...
I hate useless meetings, but they're the only way I can get dedicated attention from some coworkers. I'd absolutely prefer that the meeting was a message on Slack or Teams, but certain coworkers take hours or days to respond to direct messages. Some people just can't hold a conversation over text or email.
In fairness, the whole point of email and chat is that they're async. Forcing them to behave like a regular conversation negates their value and you might as well make a phone call. If I'm...
In fairness, the whole point of email and chat is that they're async. Forcing them to behave like a regular conversation negates their value and you might as well make a phone call.
If I'm heads-down working on a top priority project, I close my email program and chat programs, only a direct call from my boss or person on my team gets through. On those days, yea it could be 3 hours before I reply to any chats or emails.
The advantage of chat is that it can escalate to synchronous when both parties are available. The advantage to email is that its better suited to longform stuff.
I don't know about @Minori but I set up meetings for people who go 48 hours with no responses, I'm not expecting right now responses usually but a response within 48 hours is reasonable and for...
I don't know about @Minori but I set up meetings for people who go 48 hours with no responses, I'm not expecting right now responses usually but a response within 48 hours is reasonable and for some people you'll be lucky to even get a read receipt confirming they've read it within 48 hrs. Yet a meeting invite will finally trigger a response, and for some people you can even cancel the meeting now they responded.
I intentionally disable all read receipts. I don't have email notifications or I'd never get anything done. So I probably get at least somewhat where this person is coming from. It becomes...
I intentionally disable all read receipts. I don't have email notifications or I'd never get anything done. So I probably get at least somewhat where this person is coming from. It becomes impossible to work in a large environment when you've got potentially hundreds of emails a day and a dozen people vying for your attention.
That said, I'll agree 48 hours for a response to a chat is a bit obscene. Email is debatable and very dependent on context.
Where do you work and what kinda job do you do where people take more than 48 hours to respond? Sure, there are cases when people forget to respond or people forget to put their out of office...
Where do you work and what kinda job do you do where people take more than 48 hours to respond?
Sure, there are cases when people forget to respond or people forget to put their out of office replies on, but if you're constantly getting ignored by 48 hours, the problem is either you, or the culture of the company and you need to leave.
It's not that often, but often enough with a couple particular people. I actually did leave that department because of the culture and lack of accountability within it. I'm much happier in my...
It's not that often, but often enough with a couple particular people. I actually did leave that department because of the culture and lack of accountability within it. I'm much happier in my current role and haven't run into it as often but I sympathize with people in my past role.
The advantage to email is also that many of us use it as a 'to do' list. When my Inbox is clear, all of my projects are complete and I am up to date. If you ask me to do something that I can't do...
The advantage of chat is that it can escalate to synchronous when both parties are available. The advantage to email is that its better suited to longform stuff.
The advantage to email is also that many of us use it as a 'to do' list. When my Inbox is clear, all of my projects are complete and I am up to date. If you ask me to do something that I can't do right now in a chat, text, or phone call, it may get misplaced. If you are asking someone to do something for you that requires multiple steps, or precise data input from you, then you should be emailing it. Or following up a phone call, text, or chat with an email. I usually just draft one myself now to confirm the conversation and BCC myself to put it in my inbox.
It's not that I always need a synchronous conversation, but sometimes there's an unclear point that needs a short back and forth. If each reply to the conversation takes hours, it starts to get a...
It's not that I always need a synchronous conversation, but sometimes there's an unclear point that needs a short back and forth. If each reply to the conversation takes hours, it starts to get a little ridiculous and blocks any related work.
If people would actually read emails carefully and conscientiously draft replies that address every point succinctly most meetings could be emails. But generally the people who complain most about...
If people would actually read emails carefully and conscientiously draft replies that address every point succinctly most meetings could be emails. But generally the people who complain most about being called into too many calls and meetings are the very people who are crap at answering questions or communicating how things are going.
A lot of meeting bloat would go away if people just took it upon themselves to proactively communicate status and answer every part of an email when they respond. Instead a few questions or “explain to me this thing” turns into 4 emails back and forth that take hours or days to resolve because people just don’t read closely or carefully consider their reply to make sure their response is through and germane to the point.
Any time I’ve taken a long time to respond to messages it’s because I’m totally checked out. At least I have the grace to quit when that happens. Most people wait until they’re fired.
Any time I’ve taken a long time to respond to messages it’s because I’m totally checked out. At least I have the grace to quit when that happens. Most people wait until they’re fired.
Waiting till you get fired, if they won't do it for-cause (which carries legal risk), also gets you unemployment. But if you quit without having a job lined up you could be in trouble. One of...
Waiting till you get fired, if they won't do it for-cause (which carries legal risk), also gets you unemployment. But if you quit without having a job lined up you could be in trouble.
One of those checks intended to prevent abuse causing bad incentives.
Oh agreed. My doc and I have talked at length about how a lot of people self-sabotage at their job when they subconsciously don't want to be there anymore, even if they haven't realized it themselves.
Oh agreed. My doc and I have talked at length about how a lot of people self-sabotage at their job when they subconsciously don't want to be there anymore, even if they haven't realized it themselves.
The absolute bane of my existence these days. Useless, entirely too long meetings, filled with people asking dead-end questions just to seemingly hear the sound of their own voice. Lately I have...
The absolute bane of my existence these days. Useless, entirely too long meetings, filled with people asking dead-end questions just to seemingly hear the sound of their own voice. Lately I have been struggling at work and just having difficulty doing stuff or getting into my tasks because I will often get pinged on Teams to join a meeting or be interrupted by a meeting reminder. Getting my momentum back somedays is just impossible.
Today I was in a scheduled meeting that was supposed to be 30 minutes but ended up being 75 minutes because the people on the call kept asking questions that would be answered by simply checking for the information themselves.
The worst are the people who completely derail a meeting by bringing up something tangentially related, wasting everyone's time.
I have done two things lately to try to rein it in as much as possible:
Book empty blocks of time on my calendar every day
Stay off camera and just record the meeting audio with my phone.
Google calendar actually has a specific category for this called "Focus Time", you can have it automatically decline all meetings someone is trying to push on you during that time. I usually slot...
Book empty blocks of time on my calendar every day
Google calendar actually has a specific category for this called "Focus Time", you can have it automatically decline all meetings someone is trying to push on you during that time. I usually slot off all Tuesdays 100% for focus time and get most of my week's work done during then.
Meetings going 2x overtime is just bad company culture. I'd just say "I've got another meeting in 5 minutes and I need to prep" and log off after the allotted time =) Only works if your company is big enough so that everyone doesn't know everyone's schedules.
Doesn’t matter when you have PMs that will just slam meetings onto your schedule, even if you’re double or triple booked already. Honestly the only cure is to aggressively ignore meetings and IMs
Google calendar actually has a specific category for this called "Focus Time", you can have it automatically decline all meetings someone is trying to push on you during that time
Doesn’t matter when you have PMs that will just slam meetings onto your schedule, even if you’re double or triple booked already.
Honestly the only cure is to aggressively ignore meetings and IMs
Lol, I had one of these. I started accepting them and logging into all of them simultaneously on separate devices just to watch the chaos. "Sorry, these are all concurrently mandatory." It took...
Lol, I had one of these. I started accepting them and logging into all of them simultaneously on separate devices just to watch the chaos. "Sorry, these are all concurrently mandatory." It took very little time for the PM to get instruction to stop doing that.
Just one sounds like a dream :) The other trick is: if you have 3 mandatory meetings happening at the same time, everyone will just assume you’re in “The other one”.
Just one sounds like a dream :)
The other trick is: if you have 3 mandatory meetings happening at the same time, everyone will just assume you’re in “The other one”.
Whenever I request a call or meeting I always include a breakdown of what I want to talk about so the person can try to determine how much time they need to allocate and when they can fit me in....
Whenever I request a call or meeting I always include a breakdown of what I want to talk about so the person can try to determine how much time they need to allocate and when they can fit me in. My company is pretty informal so we don't often do any more scheduling than that.
On the other hand, one of our customers will request a meeting and bring in ten people (most of whom don't ever engage) with barely any info. Just the other day I got a request to schedule a meeting "to discuss an issue." I requested a little more detail about the problem and once we got the info we had a fix in less than an hour, no meeting required.
As the article says, I think the explosion of virtual meeting tools has undoubtedly exacerbated meeting bloat but really they're just another way for lazy employees to weasel out of work. If I had gone ahead and scheduled a call with the customer instead of asking for more info, this particular employee/team within that company could have sat on their hands not working while waiting for the meeting because they were "stuck."
I've worked at a small startup (<10 people, all remote) for a couple years now, and we've struggled with too much time spent in meetings as well. The founder is clearly the only one who's meeting...
I've worked at a small startup (<10 people, all remote) for a couple years now, and we've struggled with too much time spent in meetings as well. The founder is clearly the only one who's meeting oriented, and it's astonished me how much constant push-back it takes to keep things reasonable.
When I started, it was normal to spend 1-2 hours every day in a meeting with the whole team. After I became lead, I managed to get it down to 45 minutes once a week + 10 minute sync every day, which I'm quite happy about! My biggest solve there was noticing this:
The founder being present tends to elongate meetings.
The founder liked to see progress happening, and got nervous when they didn't.
A lot of the technical work (fixing a minor bug, refactoring, laying the foundation for some new feature) takes up a lot of time, but is almost invisible to someone casually checking out the product; i.e. progress often appears slow, even when a lot of necessary work is getting done.
My solution was: for daily meetings, don't include the founder - keep them technical discussions only. This keeps them short. Also, I posted a daily update in Slack, saying what each one of us had done and was going to do. This worked REALLY well—we could often finish meetings in 5 minutes, and only went over when there was actually something we needed to talk about; our boss got to see what we were working on day-by-day, but didn't have the need (or really the opportunity) to micro-manage any of it. The downside was that large changes are often large for very complicated reasons, and it was occasionally difficult to explain why tasks like "add first push notification" was the focus for days in a row. More detail helps here, even if it trends jargon-y.
So, if you figure out (1) who is pushing the most meetings, and (2) what they're gaining from it, there may be another way to solve that need and save a LOT of time. Unfortunately, I don't think this would work for systemic meeting bloat, but who knows, it might alleviate it somewhat!
Just me; I would do the daily posts of updates, and I also have unscheduled one-on-ones with the founder where I would give more detailed updates 1-2x per week. I still have more video chat hours...
Just me; I would do the daily posts of updates, and I also have unscheduled one-on-ones with the founder where I would give more detailed updates 1-2x per week. I still have more video chat hours a week than I would like, but my team's meeting time is way lower, so I'm calling that a win.
Maxwell Strachan Since the pandemic, the sheer number of useless meetings has grown out of control. Some people are starting to fight back. (tap to know more...) Shopify Useless meetings Excellent...
Maxwell Strachan
Since the pandemic, the sheer number of useless meetings has grown out of control. Some people are starting to fight back.
(tap to know more...)
Spotify Shopify
In July, the Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify unveiled an internal tool that struck a chord with people online. The way it worked was simple enough: Using a few metrics, like compensation, the number of people involved, and length of time, the tool was able to calculate and display the estimated cost of a proposed meeting by any of its employees.
The point of the tool, called the Shopify Meeting Cost Calculator, was not so much to point out an exact dollar value as to make employees think twice before they asked their co-workers to take a break from their work to come together at the exact same time and talk.
At the start of the year, the company had deleted thousands of meetings (lots of which were recurring) and banned meetings on Wednesdays to help employees reclaim their time and focus on actual work. Shopify had determined that its employees’ “most precious resource” was “uninterrupted time,” said Kaz Nejatian, the company’s chief operating officer. And large numbers of meetings were increasingly getting in the way.
Useless meetings
The number of useless meetings employees are required to attend in corporate America (and beyond) has gotten out of hand. Counter to the stereotype of the lean capitalist efficiency machine, tens of millions of people are filling their calendars (not to mention the calendars of others) with ideation sessions, half-hour check-ins, and virtual happy hours. Lazy and unproductive employees are hiding behind this wall of calendar invites, and those who wish to opt out risk awkward explanations and offense.
NPR has reportedly made a concerted effort to shorten or otherwise reduce meetings.
“Companies are taking a much greater interest in this topic than they ever have before,” said Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Elon Musk has described them as a “blight” at large organizations. Mark Cuban has said that he won’t even agree to a meeting unless the other person is cutting him a check. Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon and requires employees to sit and silently read a memo together so the conversation is useful.
Meetings are so commonly understood to be regularly scheduled time sucks that the phrase this meeting could have been an email has become a corporate colloquialism.
Microsoft has estimated that people are spending three times more of their week in meetings since February 2020, right before the pandemic sent the working world home.
Excellent and dysfunctional meetings
“Organizations that have excellent meetings are actually more profitable than those that don't. So meetings can be a competitive advantage,” said Rogelberg. But studies of organizations in various industries have found evidence that “dysfunctional” meetings may lead to less innovation and a competitive disadvantage, and cause significant and negative psychological stress for the workers themselves.
“One bad meeting causes three more meetings,” said Allen, because follow-up meetings become necessary to decipher what was said.
Meetings are a great way to seem busy
But saying no to a meeting request takes a little courage, no matter how useless it seems, especially when a superior sends the invite.
As Stallbaumer put it to me: Nowadays, “it takes work to do work.”
“a corporate security blanket” that disguises managerial incompetence, laziness, and uselessness. “Meetings are a great way to seem busy, and they are an agreed-upon method of doing stuff at work without having to show you’re doing any work of any kind,” he has written. This is particularly true of managers, he argues. “Without these meetings, it’s very hard to point to what these people do all day.”
I work at a large bank, and the culture there is exactly what you’d imagine at a large bank. The criticisms of corporate work culture all apply to my job. If I didn’t aggressively decline...
I work at a large bank, and the culture there is exactly what you’d imagine at a large bank. The criticisms of corporate work culture all apply to my job. If I didn’t aggressively decline meetings, I’d be double booked in meetings from the moment I start work to the moment I get off. As it stands, I’d say I average 5 hours of meetings per day. I’m not even in management. I’m an engineer. Often times, those meetings only exist to complain that I’m not getting engineering work done. I don’t think I need to lay out the obvious irony there. Sometimes I laugh, because it’s the kind of thing that would be in a sketch comedy show, but then I remember I’m in the middle of it. I’m at my wits end with it, and I don’t think I can stick it out much longer.
This may have been going on for a while. I took an engineering course for developing software MANY years ago. The textbook we used cited a study where the number of meetings was arbitrarily cut in...
This may have been going on for a while.
I took an engineering course for developing software MANY years ago.
The textbook we used cited a study where the number of meetings was arbitrarily cut in half. Productivity went up.
Our meetings have been getting more and more useless since the pandemic started winding down. We removed all commissions in July and every call since then has been: For some reason our conversion...
Our meetings have been getting more and more useless since the pandemic started winding down.
We removed all commissions in July and every call since then has been:
For some reason our conversion has dropped since June, we need to improve conversion.
Implore us to improve conversion, but provide no new tools, promos, etc
Director goes on a word soup ramble that is intended to be motivational.
Next month we learn that conversion dropped again and we repeat. If only there was some way to motivate sales people to close more sales...
I feel so spoiled to only have two meetings on a regular week with the occasional one or two on top of that. Then again, I came from a position where I literally had meetings every day with my...
I feel so spoiled to only have two meetings on a regular week with the occasional one or two on top of that.
Then again, I came from a position where I literally had meetings every day with my manager because she was a micromanager on top of our three different weekly team-specific meetings and any number of impromptu meetings with various stakeholders for whatever project I was working on at the time.
We have monthly educational emails sent out about improving meetings and how to shorten them with preparation in my current company, and it's really cool to see how the meetings have been transformed because of that. Most meetings I attend have very succinct agendas and once the topic is done, we all say bye and go back to our work.
I hate useless meetings, but they're the only way I can get dedicated attention from some coworkers. I'd absolutely prefer that the meeting was a message on Slack or Teams, but certain coworkers take hours or days to respond to direct messages. Some people just can't hold a conversation over text or email.
In fairness, the whole point of email and chat is that they're async. Forcing them to behave like a regular conversation negates their value and you might as well make a phone call.
If I'm heads-down working on a top priority project, I close my email program and chat programs, only a direct call from my boss or person on my team gets through. On those days, yea it could be 3 hours before I reply to any chats or emails.
The advantage of chat is that it can escalate to synchronous when both parties are available. The advantage to email is that its better suited to longform stuff.
I don't know about @Minori but I set up meetings for people who go 48 hours with no responses, I'm not expecting right now responses usually but a response within 48 hours is reasonable and for some people you'll be lucky to even get a read receipt confirming they've read it within 48 hrs. Yet a meeting invite will finally trigger a response, and for some people you can even cancel the meeting now they responded.
I intentionally disable all read receipts. I don't have email notifications or I'd never get anything done. So I probably get at least somewhat where this person is coming from. It becomes impossible to work in a large environment when you've got potentially hundreds of emails a day and a dozen people vying for your attention.
That said, I'll agree 48 hours for a response to a chat is a bit obscene. Email is debatable and very dependent on context.
Where do you work and what kinda job do you do where people take more than 48 hours to respond?
Sure, there are cases when people forget to respond or people forget to put their out of office replies on, but if you're constantly getting ignored by 48 hours, the problem is either you, or the culture of the company and you need to leave.
It's not that often, but often enough with a couple particular people. I actually did leave that department because of the culture and lack of accountability within it. I'm much happier in my current role and haven't run into it as often but I sympathize with people in my past role.
The advantage to email is also that many of us use it as a 'to do' list. When my Inbox is clear, all of my projects are complete and I am up to date. If you ask me to do something that I can't do right now in a chat, text, or phone call, it may get misplaced. If you are asking someone to do something for you that requires multiple steps, or precise data input from you, then you should be emailing it. Or following up a phone call, text, or chat with an email. I usually just draft one myself now to confirm the conversation and BCC myself to put it in my inbox.
It's not that I always need a synchronous conversation, but sometimes there's an unclear point that needs a short back and forth. If each reply to the conversation takes hours, it starts to get a little ridiculous and blocks any related work.
If people would actually read emails carefully and conscientiously draft replies that address every point succinctly most meetings could be emails. But generally the people who complain most about being called into too many calls and meetings are the very people who are crap at answering questions or communicating how things are going.
A lot of meeting bloat would go away if people just took it upon themselves to proactively communicate status and answer every part of an email when they respond. Instead a few questions or “explain to me this thing” turns into 4 emails back and forth that take hours or days to resolve because people just don’t read closely or carefully consider their reply to make sure their response is through and germane to the point.
I often can’t reply in Slack or email because I have too many meetings. It becomes a cycle that generates meetings.
Any time I’ve taken a long time to respond to messages it’s because I’m totally checked out. At least I have the grace to quit when that happens. Most people wait until they’re fired.
Waiting till you get fired, if they won't do it for-cause (which carries legal risk), also gets you unemployment. But if you quit without having a job lined up you could be in trouble.
One of those checks intended to prevent abuse causing bad incentives.
I have plenty of savings and a good job market. But I understand most people don’t.
Staying somewhere I don’t want to be ruins my mental health.
Oh agreed. My doc and I have talked at length about how a lot of people self-sabotage at their job when they subconsciously don't want to be there anymore, even if they haven't realized it themselves.
The absolute bane of my existence these days. Useless, entirely too long meetings, filled with people asking dead-end questions just to seemingly hear the sound of their own voice. Lately I have been struggling at work and just having difficulty doing stuff or getting into my tasks because I will often get pinged on Teams to join a meeting or be interrupted by a meeting reminder. Getting my momentum back somedays is just impossible.
Today I was in a scheduled meeting that was supposed to be 30 minutes but ended up being 75 minutes because the people on the call kept asking questions that would be answered by simply checking for the information themselves.
The worst are the people who completely derail a meeting by bringing up something tangentially related, wasting everyone's time.
I have done two things lately to try to rein it in as much as possible:
Google calendar actually has a specific category for this called "Focus Time", you can have it automatically decline all meetings someone is trying to push on you during that time. I usually slot off all Tuesdays 100% for focus time and get most of my week's work done during then.
Meetings going 2x overtime is just bad company culture. I'd just say "I've got another meeting in 5 minutes and I need to prep" and log off after the allotted time =) Only works if your company is big enough so that everyone doesn't know everyone's schedules.
Doesn’t matter when you have PMs that will just slam meetings onto your schedule, even if you’re double or triple booked already.
Honestly the only cure is to aggressively ignore meetings and IMs
Lol, I had one of these. I started accepting them and logging into all of them simultaneously on separate devices just to watch the chaos. "Sorry, these are all concurrently mandatory." It took very little time for the PM to get instruction to stop doing that.
Just one sounds like a dream :)
The other trick is: if you have 3 mandatory meetings happening at the same time, everyone will just assume you’re in “The other one”.
Whenever I request a call or meeting I always include a breakdown of what I want to talk about so the person can try to determine how much time they need to allocate and when they can fit me in. My company is pretty informal so we don't often do any more scheduling than that.
On the other hand, one of our customers will request a meeting and bring in ten people (most of whom don't ever engage) with barely any info. Just the other day I got a request to schedule a meeting "to discuss an issue." I requested a little more detail about the problem and once we got the info we had a fix in less than an hour, no meeting required.
As the article says, I think the explosion of virtual meeting tools has undoubtedly exacerbated meeting bloat but really they're just another way for lazy employees to weasel out of work. If I had gone ahead and scheduled a call with the customer instead of asking for more info, this particular employee/team within that company could have sat on their hands not working while waiting for the meeting because they were "stuck."
My manager declines any and all meetings that have no description of the topic. There's no reason to engage in a purposeful waste of time.
I've worked at a small startup (<10 people, all remote) for a couple years now, and we've struggled with too much time spent in meetings as well. The founder is clearly the only one who's meeting oriented, and it's astonished me how much constant push-back it takes to keep things reasonable.
When I started, it was normal to spend 1-2 hours every day in a meeting with the whole team. After I became lead, I managed to get it down to 45 minutes once a week + 10 minute sync every day, which I'm quite happy about! My biggest solve there was noticing this:
My solution was: for daily meetings, don't include the founder - keep them technical discussions only. This keeps them short. Also, I posted a daily update in Slack, saying what each one of us had done and was going to do. This worked REALLY well—we could often finish meetings in 5 minutes, and only went over when there was actually something we needed to talk about; our boss got to see what we were working on day-by-day, but didn't have the need (or really the opportunity) to micro-manage any of it. The downside was that large changes are often large for very complicated reasons, and it was occasionally difficult to explain why tasks like "add first push notification" was the focus for days in a row. More detail helps here, even if it trends jargon-y.
So, if you figure out (1) who is pushing the most meetings, and (2) what they're gaining from it, there may be another way to solve that need and save a LOT of time. Unfortunately, I don't think this would work for systemic meeting bloat, but who knows, it might alleviate it somewhat!
Did you have someone to relay your team’s progress back to the founder?
Just me; I would do the daily posts of updates, and I also have unscheduled one-on-ones with the founder where I would give more detailed updates 1-2x per week. I still have more video chat hours a week than I would like, but my team's meeting time is way lower, so I'm calling that a win.
Maxwell Strachan
Since the pandemic, the sheer number of useless meetings has grown out of control. Some people are starting to fight back.
(tap to know more...)
SpotifyShopifyUseless meetings
Excellent and dysfunctional meetings
Meetings are a great way to seem busy
I work at a large bank, and the culture there is exactly what you’d imagine at a large bank. The criticisms of corporate work culture all apply to my job. If I didn’t aggressively decline meetings, I’d be double booked in meetings from the moment I start work to the moment I get off. As it stands, I’d say I average 5 hours of meetings per day. I’m not even in management. I’m an engineer. Often times, those meetings only exist to complain that I’m not getting engineering work done. I don’t think I need to lay out the obvious irony there. Sometimes I laugh, because it’s the kind of thing that would be in a sketch comedy show, but then I remember I’m in the middle of it. I’m at my wits end with it, and I don’t think I can stick it out much longer.
This may have been going on for a while.
I took an engineering course for developing software MANY years ago.
The textbook we used cited a study where the number of meetings was arbitrarily cut in half. Productivity went up.
Our meetings have been getting more and more useless since the pandemic started winding down.
We removed all commissions in July and every call since then has been:
Next month we learn that conversion dropped again and we repeat. If only there was some way to motivate sales people to close more sales...
I feel so spoiled to only have two meetings on a regular week with the occasional one or two on top of that.
Then again, I came from a position where I literally had meetings every day with my manager because she was a micromanager on top of our three different weekly team-specific meetings and any number of impromptu meetings with various stakeholders for whatever project I was working on at the time.
We have monthly educational emails sent out about improving meetings and how to shorten them with preparation in my current company, and it's really cool to see how the meetings have been transformed because of that. Most meetings I attend have very succinct agendas and once the topic is done, we all say bye and go back to our work.