This reminds me of my last remote job. Every day, we would have. Standup meeting. These are supposed to be 15 minutes, but typically would last well over an hour. On top of this, we would have: planning (4 hour meeting), review (3 hour), retrospective (3 or 4 hours), and the boss decided we weren't having enough meetings..so he added a soical meeting every Friday for an hour. We were all remote and this was a way for us to so somehow become closer as a team.

at one point, I was paid for more time in meetings than work. The only way this didn't happen was when we were putting out fires because mysteriously, we weren't making project goals and upper management was putting pressure on my boss.

Haha thats hilarious.

I currently work for a fully remote company and it's completely the opposite. We do one weekly status meeting which is usually 20-30 mins. Then project planning/troubleshooting/teambuilding meetings as needed usually around 2-4 hours per MONTH.

EVERYTHING else is discussed/solved very efficiently via IM.

I hope to never work for a company with meetingitus again, big waste of time and resources.

Zapier?

No, but they look like a cool company.

OMG, that sounds like where I work.

It's acceptable to skip a few of the meetings after things inevitably turn into a cluster bomb and somebody has to start writing the actual code.

And yet people complain about the pointlessness of meetings despite not doing anything to make them more efficient (cf start and end on time, avoid chit-chat, stick to the agenda, send actions quickly afterwards etc). It only takes a small about of self-discipline to get there but everyone has to exercise it.

I'm lucky to have learned from some excellent meeting-chairs but have only been able to reproduce the efficiency when I formed and ran my own team. Never pulled it off when joining someone else's.

The #1 thing to make meetings more efficient is not to have them. Very many meetings, IME, are held for purposes for which a face-to-face meeting is not an efficient tool, and for which decentralized, asynchronous mechanisms like email would serve better.

Most meetings are primate dominance rituals.

That means they're unproductive. On the other hand, if you force a venue change, you're just going to get hyper aggressive git commit messages or something equally stupid to show "who's boss". The only solution I'm aware of is to select employees for hire based on likelihood of not being "into" primate dominance rituals, at least not at work. This is pretty hard to figure out at the interview stage and once a company is eventually infected, its plague dynamics time, and much like a bad flu season, work grinds to a halt.

> Most meetings are primate dominance rituals.

I don't think that's necessarily even a subconscious purpose, but most human group face-to-face interactions end up involving some elements of such rituals, and in the case of meetings they are particularly dominant when the "rich interaction" that is enabled by face-to-face communication isn't used specifically for something else.

So what would be your rules of thumb for when meetings are worthwhile?

The simple two-part question to identify when a meeting is worthwhile and what the scope of the meeting should be (and what should be in other channels): Is simultaneous, interactive, many-to-many communication necessary, and why, specifically, is it necessary? (A followup, to make sure that people are ready to have the meeting -- another common problem that makes meetings a waste of time and results in inappropriate things being done in the meeting venue -- is to ask: "what needs to happen first so that people are ready to engage in that many-to-many interaction"?)

Lots of meetings, IME, are held by one person to gather information from many people or to distribute information from one person to many people -- these kind of one-to-many or many-to-one scenarios are the easiest thing to see doesn't require a meeting (many-to-one being the more inefficient.) There's even some cases of many-to-many communication where there isn't any real need for interactivity. And plenty of cases where a meeting that is held for a many-to-many interactive purpose spends much of its time doing top-down, one-to-many communication for much of the meeting because something that ought to have been distributed to be reviewed by participants to be ready for a productive meeting was instead distributed for the first time in the meeting, wasting most of the meeting time.

If two people can't figure out stuff they should ask third to join them. Then you are having worthwhile meeting. Meeting that are not about figuring out stuff or about figuring out stuff that can be figured by two people are not worthwhile except socially. But if you need social meeting why pretend you are doing work?

I hate meetings. A co-worker and I play a game whenever we are in charge of a meeting- see if we can end it early. It's amazing when an hour long meeting can be finished in 20 minutes. Unfortunately, there are a few people that like to drag the meeting out (unprepared, asking unrelated questions, making people wait for XYZ event that could be sent as an email later).

Ha, that's a great idea, to gamify it! Monthly competition to see who can end a meeting the earliest?

It's hard to get to the meetings 5 minutes early when they are back to back to back... :-(

Scheduling the meeting directly before lunch should take care of ending it on time.

In my experience how late you were for a meeting was a proxy for your status in the company. The longer you kept others waiting for you, the higher your status.

I've seen this play out in social groups, too.

Could you elaborate what "the American way" is?