Comment by exhilaration
1 day ago
The solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.
1 day ago
The solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.
Heh some people are on time, some people are late. It's seemingly a culture thing, and neither side understands the other. You say "of course nobody will stop at 9:50am" and that is exactly what I would do.
> neither side understands the other.
Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.
Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.
6 replies →
Not everywhere is like wherever you are.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-11-tr-insid...
Non-punctual cultures can view on-time people as clueless, over-eager, and annoying.
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In my experience the people who are late are usually senior or exec types who arrive late with a lot of bluster and comments about how busy they are and then "Ok where are we?" like they are taking over the meeting.
I love how true this article resonated to me, since it's very similar to Spain (but now I live in the polar opposite, Japan, where I am supposed to be at least 15 mins early):
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-brazilians-a...
I view people who show up too early as rude, as do many others.
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It's considered at least weird to show up to some parties exactly on time, yes.
> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
No. Not for meetings. What is perceived as rude is making a big deal about it. You think it's a major social faux-pas, they think it's a "meh", and if you make a big deal about it and get offended now you're just being rude for no reason at all.
For personal and informal meetings, yes, being "on time" may mean annoying the host a bit. Why? Because when they say the party starts at 6pm, everyone should understand it as they should start showing up no earlier than 6:30pm etc.
I am not saying I agree or take side with any of these, just presenting it as both sides see it.
I was accused of not having enough to do by a boss. He was habitually late to everything. I am at every meeting 3 to 5 minutes early, because I leave every meeting at the :20 or :50 depending. Then I have 5 minutes to pee or whatever before going to the next one.
Either way, he saw me get to meetings a few minutes early and legitimately accused me of not having enough to do.
That was one of two jobs that I've ever walked out of.
In my experience, being on time isn't viewed as rude, but it is viewed as a nuisance, reflecting poorly on other people.
I had a Chinese tutor who got pretty upset that I would show up to lessons before she got there. Her first approach was to assure me that it was ok if I showed up later. Eventually she responded by showing up very, very early.
In a different case, I had an appointment to meet a friend, and she texted me beforehand to ask whether I'd left home yet. Since the appointment was quite some distance from my home, and I couldn't predict the travel time, I had already arrived, but upon learning that my friend dropped everything to show up early... and asked me why I was so early. I don't see a problem with waiting for a scheduled appointment if I show up early! But apparently other people do?
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Probably not, but they'll roll their eyes at ya when they show up.
This was the de-facto practice for courses at U of M and I loved it. Although it appears they may have ended that practice in 2018
https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
Our team collectively decided all meetings should start 5 min late and end at the half hour boundary (we do 55min instead of 50min).
This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.
Unfortunately that isn't the solution. As the article correctly notes, meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out. This is a universal truth in office buildings.
> meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out.
The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.
I've worked mostly remotely, and in companies where management insists on having visibility into subordinates' calendars. So I've placed an awful lot of official sounding decoy meetings on my calendar right after meetings that were completely unnecessary (could easily have been an email), hut where management would certainly listen to themselves talk past the buzzer.
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I always felt this was wholly ineffective coming from someone who wasn’t contributing or necessary to any given meeting, but it’s important to establish and hold boundaries like this.
Even more points when a participant speaks up at the very beginning, to announce, “I’ve got a hard-stop at 9:50, so I’ll need to leave at that point no matter what.” Then the responsibility for wrap-up is placed squarely on leadership.
Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.
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In most places I've worked it's de rigueur to give people at least 5 mins to arrive before proceeding. Do people really just start meetings the instant they get in the room?!
>The solution [...] is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am.
Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...
You can NEVER knowingly trick yourself with clock tricks.
Because all it will do is make you really good at time math.
I've seen it even back when people would set all their clocks in their car and home 5 minutes fast, they just got real good at doing five minute math.
Haha. I was one of those “set clock fast” people until one day realized that all it did was make the time I was supposed to be somewhere even more ambiguous than before. It never helped me arrive somewhere exactly on time, but certainly contributed to me arriving late because my mind forgot precisely what time my clock was set to relative to real time.
In that case you can just keep scheduling it for 9:00 to 10:00, I guess?
But I agree with the parent, if you need to move something then move the start.
I presume in that case each meeting would just stretch to 10 over the hour.
Well that's the claim, isn't it. People tend to see an hour tick over and think "well, better wrap up". The impulse is much less strong at ten minutes to the hour. It's a bit like pricing things just below a round number because it doesn't feel quite so expensive. GP's comment makes sense to me.
My team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway.
For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
If "30" minute meetings start 5 minutes late, then you can only go 5 past reliably.