[shalmanese]

> However, there are ~10 hours of meetings each week that I need to join either because: 1. There is an expectation by management that I should be there in case they have a question (often they do not).

We dealt with this in the zoom era by having some people present but not paying attention. They would join the meeting but then turn the sound off and do their own thing. If we needed their input on something, then we would ping them on slack and they would come in and provide their input. In GCal, marking people as "optionally" attending meant that they were free to not pay attention.

> 2. I join to make sure I do not miss the critical pieces of information that I need. That is often five minutes out of sixty minutes.

We made a rule that every meeting had to have an agenda list posted to slack before the meeting and a summary posted to slack after the meeting. The meeting convener was responsible for making sure this happened but could delegate this responsibility to someone else. Often, this was a good onboarding task for new members joining the team.

[n4r9]

I quite like this and I feel like you could go one better and have optional people be "on call" during the meeting i.e. they should be available to ring in if needed.

[shalmanese]

We tried that initially and there was just a bit too much friction involved in them finding the zoom link and then joining and then getting their mic connected and everything. It was easier to just have them join the meeting in the beginning and be muted so it was ~5s for them to hop into a convo.