Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly? Hi HN - curious to understand how much time engineering leaders spend in meetings. Thinking engineering managers, directors and VP's... Extra credit: What's the longest duration meeting you regularly have? (For OP, it's a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML) |
My longest regular meeting is 1 hour though.
And please don't say "sit down".
Daily stand-up.
Weekly department.
Weekly refinement.
One or more demos per week.
One or more random meetings per week.
Weekly, I have...
* 1on1's with my developers and peers (30min per person, 4-6 per week)
* Standup (2x 15 min)
* Engineering leads meeting (1x 30min)
* SRE catchup (1x 1hr)
Other misc meetings...
* Engineering leads kvetch (unstructured 1hr every 2wks, cut short if there's nothing on our minds)
* My squad's retro (45min every 3wks)
* My squad's grooming (1hr every 3wks)
* Platform retro (multiple squads, 1hr every 1mo)
* BI-Quarterly KPI/OKR Planning & Review (1-2hr every 1.5 months)
* Skip-level manager meeting (1hr every 3mo)
Wednesdays are my no-meetings-slash-deep-work day. I probably invest between 1-3 hours in pairing, by request. I clean my calendar aggressively.
tl;dr ~5 hours of meetings per week
It was a remote development job with lots of meetings:
-1 hour standups daily -twice per week, 3 hour planning meetings on top of the daily standup -Friday we had a 'watercooler' meeting for an hour after the standup, where we were supposed to 'tell jokes' or 'share a funny story'. Since most of the developers were overseas and from different countries/cultural backgrounds, it usually ended up being very awkward. -twice/month we had a 4+ hour big-picture meeting on top of the daily standup
Sometimes, I would bill over half my weekly hours as meetings.
The strange part is that with all of these meetings, the tickets that would be assigned to me would be vague or filled with missing information. Even when I would have a 1-1 call with the boss to explain the ticket, she would talk in circles and could never give me the exact information I needed.
When I completed the ticket and didn't read her mind, things would have to be re-written.
I was eventually replaced by an overseas worker from India (the boss told me I was too expensive and she could hire someone from India for much less) and the company lost most of its investors within a few years.
At a previous company, we had 12 people in a standup. It took about an hour. (I didn't stay there long.)
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* ~2 hours of 1-1s with mentors/mentees/manager (manager is weekly, others are biweekly)
* 1 hour team operations meeting
* 2 hour company-wide operations meeting that I don't have to buy enjoy attending
* 1 hour sprint planning every other week
* 1 hour demos every other week
* Another 4-10 hours worth of ad-hoc meetings throughout the week
So somewhere around 10-15 hours worth of meetings, but all of the pre-planned meetings are either very early in the day or very late in the day. The worst weeks are when the ad-hoc meetings go way over 10 hours (several design cycles lining up or several emergent emergencies that need attention), but otherwise I really enjoy it.
Sometimes I'll have a recurring meeting for a particular project, but even those end up being useless as we talk about the project all the time outside of the meetings, and we end up cancelling half of the recurring ones.
On average I'll have around 3 hours of non-recurring meetings per week (although some weeks have none).
That said, there's probably ~2 hours a day of impromptu conversing with colleagues on work topics that eats up a lot of time.
The rest of the company has the normal "waste half of the week" set of agile meetings that they attend.
All in all, I'm probably spending anywhere from 2-5 hours per week on meetings, on average.
Our organization is pretty distributed across a variety of timezones, so the expectation of having face-to-face meetings is not always feasible. That means project spec reviews and other planning-related discussions are typically performed asynchronously over Confluence and Slack.
I have about 8 hours of regularly scheduled meetings (standups, sprint reviews, delivery meetings) with 2-4 hours of "as needed" meetings (client sync, etc.) in a given week, with 1-2 hours of company meetings, too. This does not count one-off help sessions and "fire fights."
I have 18 meetings a week.
I try my hardest to stack them all onto Mon and Wed, leaving the other 3 days as meeting free as possible.
Now I am down to one fixed meeting a week and I sometimes accept a couple more if the topic actually needs several people in the room to discuss.
I hate meetings!
Where I am now (generally quite functional IMHO)- I have a few monthly meetings that are an hour in length.
Most of it, actually, if I include 1:1 meetings and job interviews too.
Regarding duration: we have an unwritten rule that default meeting for 2-4 people duration is 25 minutes. If I schedule a longer meeting - I should provide a reason.
Meeting longer than an hour and a half are counterproductive, average person just cannot keep concentrating on conversation for that long.
The remainder are not mine, forced to assist. Mostly 60 mins each. I try to join via Skype from my desk and shoot emails while people drone on.
My tip: never give more than 45 mins in your schedule. Your reports will focus more and you can use those 15 mins to take notes, to-dos
About 5 per week - mostly 30 mins. Beyond that it's personal style: I much prefer 1:1s to catchups over a coffee so not much meetings happening my side. If something is inconvenient I just skip it - nobody's really on my case about meetings.
>What's the longest duration meeting you regularly have?
1 hr
At worst, in a previous job, where I was the system architect, I probably spent close to 20 hours a week in scheduled meetings. My longest regularly scheduled meeting was about 2 hours.
About 15h per week, or almost half my time basically.
* ~1h daily for status meetings
* ~2h twice a week for project coordination and discussion
* ~4h once a week for overarching architecture decisions across all projects
* Various other 30min to 1h meetings depending on the week
It's terribly inefficient, but I cannot change it; believe me, I tried.
I don't have time to code these days. I don't really miss it that much, but it's nice when I do get a chance to write something.
About 1/4 of them are 1:1s, another 1/4 are leadership meetings similar reactions. I'd say another 1/4 are project planning, kickoffs, and checkins. The last 1/4 are just ad-hoc one-off meetings, often to deal with an emergency or personnel issue.
I don't mind it, generally. I actually like the face-to-face interactions with people and enjoy most of the meetings. The problem I have with it is the whole "meeting that could have been an email" thing. Especially status update meetings. Huge waste of time.
The other problem is that I do have a number of direct reports and I'm doing them a disservice by not having time to interact with them more directly. I'm in the process of hiring some more managers to take that load off my back.
The phrase “executive assistant” is just one huge mistake. It makes the role sound like a secretary to one person, which makes people think they shouldn’t have one until they’re overburdened to the point of being completely ineffective at their job. In fact, even small- or medium-sized teams can benefit immensely by having a team assistant who can handle tons of logistics and odds and ends for everyone on the team.
TL;DR people should send status update emails instead of holding meetings whenever possible
I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.
I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.
My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:
X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) / (5 weekdays) )
In my case (40-18)/5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!
Around here, everyone complains about meetings, yet few do anything about it.
Its just easier to go to meetings, instead of thinking hard to reduce others’ time with google docs, async discussion, etc.
And those who creatively push back against meetings fear being called “hard to work with”
I think it was a side effect of the scrum coaches having little work to do, so we would have planning meetings with the whole team, even if nothing in your domain was on the schedule for the meeting. We also re-defined primative agile concepts every week, as in we would have to debate what a bug, task, or chore meant, every week.
When I raised the concept of meetings only involving those who it concerned, or even better, letting a workflow develop organically, I was accused of being lazy and not committed. In a lot of manager heavy orgs, the culture is that meetings are what productivity is measured by, and more visible.
I generally have about 5 meetings a week, totaling around 3 hours. I don't enjoy meetings, but they seem somewhat productive and the burden isn't too bad.
Here's a rough survey, should be able to see result graphs afterward submission:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUkV2P1VxAnRSD88eU...
Raw data results link for community to look at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x59q4CbEGOeYirskJ7Ac...
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Main Q: ~16 hrs/week (had about 10 1:1's/week for a while)
Bonus Q: 2hrs
We believe in that most of things can be communicated asynchronously. For those things that strictly need to be address synchronously we keep those too slots in the week.
Because if you're a VP or senior director then yeah, your life is probably meetings and that's normal. If you're an engineering team lead spending 16 hours a week in meetings, well maybe not so much.
Without that info your post doesn't really tell us much, other than some people have more meetings than others :)
One thing I'm trying to get better about is not attending all of the weekly/bi-weekly "let's just check in with each other" meetings. If I'm not attending I let them know so they can pull me in if needed, but otherwise I make those meetings more of the "if I'm not actively engaged in deep work, I'll be there" priority level. FOMO is real, but I'm combating it with the satisfaction of seeing servers up and code running. :)
~16h meeting every weeks. To be honest, I'm very much dislike that, but people seems to love talking more than writing detailed docs.
People do like talking and lots of meetings are unnecessary. But I think you can deal with the issue better if you get into the heads of the people calling the meetings and figure out alternatives that meet their needs as well.
At my busiest, it is closer to 30 hours a week, and my longest regular meeting is a quarterly planning offsite that's ~3x 8 hour days.
EDIT: I can't say that I resent any of these, since they're simply a part of the job. My role has a component that I have come to call 'state synchronization'. I act as a bridge between multiple groups by syncing up technical knowledge, status, and blockers between the various engineering groups (and other technical leadership) who I work with.
Standups work great for small groups, but they don't scale well beyond 10-15 people.
I'd say anywhere from 5-15 hours per week in meetings. But the real killer is the dead little "pockets" between the meetings. Hard to get any real, deep work done when your day is chopped into pieces.
Meetings themselves aren't so bad, but when I was a manager, our meetings would require a half hour drive somewhere, or going up to the 40th floor of some building, preparing slides, charts, and so on. Sometimes you need to bring in an expert/consultant/trainer and brief her on the project prior to the meeting.
Most of the work is around those meetings. You can have 20 hours of meetings scheduled per week, and that translates to 30-40 hours of time blocked off and 10-20 more hours of writing reports, updating Jira, answering emails, taking screenshots, and so on. If you've got a remote team, that's even more workload.
The longest meeting we've had was about 3 days long, 9-5 straight UI/UX workshop. The client balked at this at first - they have their share of meetings already, but afterwards everyone agreed it was 100% worth it. It was the only way to get a lot of stakeholders in the room, and it killed a lot of assumptions - we had UX requests that were not technically possible, UX that didn't fit user behavior, underestimated the robustness of some hacks that a dev/now engineering manager made 3 years ago, and so on.
My longest meetings are the design sessions. It's myself, another architect, and our director for 2 hours twice a week. However, I don't consider that a meeting as much as a productive working session.
That makes... ~30 hrs/wk of meetings. Yup, that just about matches my calendar.
Longest: the 1.5 hrs my manager and I have blocked off for our 1-1s. It doesn't always run that long, but we also often run out of time.
Edit: Role is VP Engineering
But on a light day I have around 2-3 meetings a day. One of them usually being an interview with the candidate (either phone or onsite).
That sounds miserable and unproductive OP :'(
This sounds pretty dysfunctional. Is that a productive meeting?
I was involved in an "all leadership" type meeting that was heading in that direction, and then we switched to a memo based meeting.
Everyone wrote their update in a Google Doc, each team had a section. The expectation was that you read the memo before coming to the meeting.
Then we had an agenda with specific time blocks for each topic, and the expectation was that you came for the topics that were relevant to you, and it was totally acceptable to come and go in the middle.
The meeting was scheduled for three hours, but almost no one came for the entire three hours, and usually we didn't have enough topics to fill it all anyway.
/me NEEDS MORE FIZZLE
If you don’t have an opinion then you find out what happened with the follow up email/memo.
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Once per week with CTO and once per month with every developer + QA + DevOps.
Standing meetings are 99% a waste of time, usually about someone/s trying to climb the career stripper pole.
The rest of my week is a fragmented disaster but at least Fridays are nice.
I love the idea of a regular "defrag" process. I haven't done this consciously but it's happened that way because I'm in Pacific time zone and we have a EU headquarters, so as a result there is a chunk between 7am-11am Pacific that is almost always booked. Leaves the rest of the day for working time. Not perfect but works for me.
Scheduling meetings and aiding in calendar management for everyone. Running meetings and taking notes. Collecting and assembling agenda items in advance for any and all meetings. Setting up and handling logistics for team events. Managing team-related documentation on the company wiki so it's always up-to-date. Helping schedule any phone calls or meetings you need with candidates, partners in industry, customers, etc. Catering food for customer meetings. If someone's going to give a presentation, making sure everything is in order, setting up and running A/V, recording the presentation if desired, etc. Keeping track of annual review, six-month, and quarterly check-in cycles and helping you make sure you're hitting every single checkbox for all of your people. I could keep going but after a certain point many of the duties end up being specific to your team or organization. In general, though, there are probably many things you do that don't necessarily require your specialized expertise and knowledge.
There's some overlap with what PMs do, but generally this person is focused on the team itself instead of specific projects. You might feel that's what you're supposed to do, but once the team is big enough you'll find yourself in a situation where you don't have time for the people on the team anymore -- or at least not as much as you feel like you should.
Offloading this stuff frees you up to focus on people, hiring, retention, unexpected urgent things of a variety of natures, and engineering (maybe not writing code but working with folks to make sure everything that's going on makes sense, meshes together, is aligned with broader objectives, etc.). If you run a larger organization and have managers under you, it frees up your managers to do the same. They'll spend more time with their people and less time on logistics.
Do you actually get standups resolved in under 15 minutes more than half the time?
If so, what's your secret?
I think for us at least, just having the team all aligned on wanting to finish the meeting as fast as possible helps keep it running quickly and smoothly.
A stand up done right is IMHO not a problem and effective. Various other status and weekly meetings generally just waste time.