Comment by dxdm
1 day ago
Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.
I think the point is to reduce meeting time from 60 minutes to 55 or even 50 and be firm about it. People need to expect to start and end on time; giving them a natural break between helps make this happen even for people whose job requires them to be in back-to-back meetings.
Personally, I think starting on the hour (or half-hour, etc) and ending "early" is better, because it tends to sync well with the calendars of external folks.
But in the end, moving start or end time is only part of the solution. This is a time-management problem, and in addition to constraining the available time, it also needs proper management of the available time within the meeting.
> Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.
It matters because there sometimes are meeting where it is very important to know how much time you have to prepare appropriately. As long as the expectations are set beforehand, it matters less.
I roughly agree with the rest of your post. "Just be punctual" is a cop out that ignores the fact that I need to have enough breaks between meetings before I can even think about being punctual. Make space for breaks and enforce the time allocated is imo the solution, it matters less where exactly the 5-minute break fits (but I tend to agree that people would more likely end on the full hour, so that would mean we need to start 5 past).