[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

Had an idea

These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules.

So...

What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.

People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.

[shoo]

> Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.

Like phishing training, but for meeting attendance. Fail the test and accept a decoy meeting and you must complete a round of mandatory training in how to distinguish a useless meeting from one that is worth attending.

I wonder if enterprises would buy this? Phishing training companies make a living.

[remyp]

I attempted a startup to fix meeting culture a few years back. Selling the product was nearly impossible. We got some nibbles and a couple bites, but it eventually became clear that the vast majority of companies just don't care about the problem. They'll tell you it's a problem (because it is) but nobody wants to write a check to fix it.

[tyre]

When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way to get quality heads down time.

All of them were titled something like “$X WG” where X was what we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for “Working Group”.

We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.

[hoherd]

I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.

[tyre]

I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(

[magneticnorth]

YMMV whether this will fly in your company culture, but I titled mine "Focus time, please ask before scheduling".

And when people inevitably didn't ask, I'd just decline unless I especially wanted to attend. I find myself getting invited to meetings sometimes just because the organizer wants to be inclusive and make sure everyone is looped in who might want to be, and I figure that's what's going on if they added me without asking.

If it's really important for me to be there, they'll see my time block and ask me.

[rukuu001]

Google Cal will auto-decline meetings that occur during ‘out of office’ events.

I have several of these ‘out of office’ events recurring in my calendar that I use for concentrated work

[minkzilla]

To make them stick you have to decline meetings scheduled during that time

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

Fuck Off We're Working Working Group

[makeitdouble]

> Your boss

That requires your boss to be good at meetings, and in particular to take extra care of preparing meetings with well crafted agendas and not just setting up random spots where they spend the first 5min remembering the actually ultra important thing they needed to discuss with you.

I've never seen an org where that applies to most higher ups. In particular for stuff they don't want to leave in writing or are delicate subjects.

[unregistereddev]

I'm somewhat convinced this is already a thing. It would explain some of the meeting notices I get.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.

What could this possibly accomplish? I accept meeting requests not because I have some perverse desire to waste my time (and everyone else's), but because when I fail to show up for meetings (as has happened, quite by accident), I get shit for it. The eastern European folks are constantly setting meetings before 8am, but they can't just set them and leave them there. They'd delete these, put them at another time, but forget to include my name in the list... and then my boss starts giving me hell for why I'm not showing up to them. Yeh, I love getting up at 5:30am just so I can psychically deduce that you're all in an early morning meet.

So now you'd want to spam up my inbox with 15% more meetings, but I have to guess which of these imbecilic invitations are the real ones, and to taunt me if I can't always tell? I'm not the problem here, punishing me can't improve this for anyone.

[rcpt]

Thanks Michael Scott.

[maxbond]

There is nothing in the world Michael Scott loves more than an all hands meeting that no one actually needs to attend, and we would never play a part in combatting them.