Yesterday I had a 1 hour meeting where 3 of the 7 participants needed to attend another meeting after 30 minutes. We reorganized the agenda to hit the issues that they were especially concerned about while they were available, and then did the other things in the next 20 minutes, finishing a little early.

It's not impossible, it just requires a culture of consideration, communication, and prioritization.

I wonder if that's the key -- maybe it's acceptable to shorten one meeting on your behalf (or at least your participation in that meeting) if the reason you'll miss this meeting is that you'll be in a different meeting. As long as you're in some time-wasting activity, they're satisfied.

I say mostly tongue in cheek...

That's funny if it wasn't true.

"I have to get out of the meeting as I need to work on a task."

A task? Ok, so you can stay?

It fits right into "wow, jealous of your agenda"...when it has some blank spots. The spots you actually do work, but somehow are regarded as slack.

"He's out of line, but he's right."

It also heavily favors the loud and self important who will force their way to the front and dominate the conversation. In an hour long meeting there is much more opportunity to give everyone several minutes to speak and have group discussion and deliberation. Now if your meeting can actually get done in 20 minutes, it probably should have been a phone call.

Well, most meetings are phone calls. Over time, I've seen more and more things default to 30 minutes whether meetings, presentations, or whatever. That's not to say that an hour isn't the right length for certain things, but it's reasonable to default to 30 minutes unless people think more time is needed.

With so many people working remotely, aren't all meetings basically phone calls now?

Practically the only think I like about Scrum is that there's a person who is slightly at arm's length to referee these sorts of things. But it's a sort of broken clock scenario.

I wonder what percentage of meetings occur because someone in leadership is disorganized and / or unable to properly communicate with staff while they're performing their jobs on a daily basis.

Gonna say that, excluding standup, this has to be at least 50%.

I've heard this class of meetings described as "organizing your thoughts with witnesses" and that's a brilliant explanation in my experience.

That’s a brilliant description. And might not always be a bad thing.

There are no technological tricks and very few sociological tricks that can cause an immature person to act like an adult.

And the older I get, the more I realize that thinking that such a thing exists is its own kind of immaturity.