Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.

I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:

1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late. 2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. 3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.

The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.

In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.

I've never seen this pressure.

> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.

It's like I live in an entirely different world.

Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.

Half of the people who get the notification click "join" without checking. This ends up with a half-populated meeting room. The issue becomes obvious, and somebody says, "Let's dial back in 5 mins", and drops off. Half of the people like the idea and drop off, while the rest decide to stay and chat.

Meanwhile, some of those who dropped off see this as a great opportunity to grab a brew. That inadvertently triggers some water-cooler, kettle-corner chats, and they end up running late for the 5-past. The rest usually get engaged in something else to make use of 5 minutes, and miss 5-past since no new notifications are issued due to the people already chatting in the meeting :)

I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.

There’s a famous example from the Lucasfilm/Pixar deal: a Lucasfilm exec used to arrive late as a power move, until Steve Jobs started the meeting exactly on time without him. The exec walked in 5 minutes later and had already lost the room. And Jobs gets the deal.

  I work as an Engineering Manager ...

  If you try to end at 1:55pm, you will likely talk until 
  2:00pm anyway, which then runs into the next meeting.

Engineering Managers which see value in giving coworkers a five minute break between meetings ensure the breaks exist. Those which do not and only pay lip service to the concept will burn through predefined breaks no matter where they exist on a clock face.

1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.

2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.

That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.

You start on time, you end on time.

The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.

But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)

Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.

This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.

Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.

I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.

The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).

I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.

I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.

Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.

We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.

Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.

Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.

Shifting everything from :00 to :05 is theatre at best, and a slippery slope more often.

You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.

People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.

Or are we all using catheters now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...

Zero BS If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.

If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.

The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves

This will surely solve the problem.

But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.

It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.

Setting meetings to start at :05 or :20 or :35 or :50 adds friction.

Defaults matter for habit formation.

There is your golden opportunity to point out internal Gemini to the Calendar codebase and make it become reality.

Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?

We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.

We did this at Google too while I was there (only the started 5-mins past part). It works really well.

No need to change the Calendar events though. It's just implicit that we'll start 5-mins past. (Or, well, explicit in MIT's case).

If you can’t tell people to stop being late, you are not doing your job as a manager.

Words to live by.

In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.

False.

This doesn’t work.

Source: a company doing this. Meetings just continue on to the 5 after mark.

People magically show up on time and pay attention and the meeting ends on time or early.

I have to assume this discussion is about the 90% of meetings that could have been a group chat or email chain.

If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.

At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.

Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.

It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.

Fixed time makes it so much easier to reason than random stuff.

As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.

The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.

The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:

1. Don't have back to back meetings

2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda

3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.

But yeah, this guy work for google, says it all.

honor end times so everyone has a few minutes to take a bathroom break or move to a diffrrent room, or prep mentally, etc

Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.

Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.

If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.