Ask HN: How many meetings per week
Hello HN! I joined a company a few months ago, and from mid-November to end of December I spent 20 days in meetings. I started to decline most of the meeting and then I noticed that my teammates were also involved in a lot of meeting. For the last 3 retrospective, my teammates complained to get too many meetings (between 15 to 25hours). We got a a lot of recurring meeting that are useless, but also a lot of meeting where 10-15 attend to it. I've tried to implement asynchronous communication to update team but it is pretty hard!
To give you more context, I'm a senior Product Growth Manager, I have an Engineer, a Growth Marketer in my team. I used to work in small company where we used async communication a lot. My question is How many meetings per week do you have? It would be great if you could:
* precise your role, I guess a VP Engineer would have more meetings than a Software Engineer!
* What kind of meeting do you have?
* Which one are productive/unproductive?
* How do you deal with unproductive meeting?
* How those solutions have helped you? How those solutions haven't helped you?
ps: I don't say I want to remove all meetings, but having 8 hours meeting per week would be great. * Here a Lead engineer * we have daily standups, retrospective... but also weekly update * not a big fan of update meeting, but it is pretty hard to remove them. Productive meetings: everything related to creativity / learning * declining them when I feel this one won’t be productive. I previously built a tool that evaluates cost of meetings. It made people aware of the potential money lost per meetings. It was a very basic tool