[bialpio]

How do you plan to show up on time if one of your meetings ends at 2pm, the next one starts at 2pm, the meeting rooms are 3 floors apart, and you need to go to the restroom because you've been in meetings since lunch and need to pee? You're going to clone yourself?

[relaxing]

1:55 pm “I gotta run to my next meeting” and slip out the door.

[al_borland]

Tell the people in the first meeting at the start that you’ll need to leave a few minutes early, to set the expectation and make sure any important stuff is done early. Then when it hits your transition window, politely tell them you have to run and leave.

[RaftPeople]

And have some subset of people in each mtg do that every mtg every single day?

I personally prefer the 5 minute gap, it's a simple and clean solution.

[master-lincoln]

You have to reject one meeting invitation and tell them why.

Isn't the easier solution to stop meetings 5 minutes to the next meeting slot?

[matusp]

At the start of the first meeting, you annouce that you need to leave at 1:50 and ask the meeting to respect that.

[michaelt]

The thing is, a lot of meetings start with presenting evidence of a problem, then have some discussion of the problem and potential options, and only in the last 10 minutes do the proposed actions turn into firm decisions with names against them.

And often if I'm in a meeting it's because I think the problem is important and I want it solved. Getting permission for my team to fix things, or getting other teams to agree to fix things, is the point.

[dxdm]

In my experience, this is a time management problem. Meetings tend to fill the time available. Rarely are there meetings that have to last a full hour and could not have been over after 50 minutes.

Or what makes 60 minutes so magical that you can wrap up a meeting quickly once that marker approaches? People need to leave, that's why. If it had been clear from the start that people will leave after 50 minutes, you can wrap up by then, same way you wrap things up at 60.

There is a lot of slack in meetings. What you need is someone to manage the available time and move things along, make sure that there is room at the end to get to a conclusion. You will have these last 10 minutes after 40 minutes instead of 50 if you pay attention to time and keep things moving.

This can be done, even with time to spare for pleasantries. I know this because I've been in meetings and I have run meetings like this. It helps if you can start on time and don't have to wait for stragglers in the beginning who needed a break between their back-to-back meetings.

[bialpio]

I'd rather have a 5-minute break built-in for everyone by starting 5-past and actually enforce meeting end-times. Behaviors would change if people knew they had 25 or 55 minutes for a meeting and that folks would just leave when the time is up.

[dxdm]

Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.

I think the point is to reduce meeting time from 60 minutes to 55 or even 50 and be firm about it. People need to expect to start and end on time; giving them a natural break between helps make this happen even for people whose job requires them to be in back-to-back meetings.

Personally, I think starting on the hour (or half-hour, etc) and ending "early" is better, because it tends to sync well with the calendars of external folks.

But in the end, moving start or end time is only part of the solution. This is a time-management problem, and in addition to constraining the available time, it also needs proper management of the available time within the meeting.

[bialpio]

> Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.

It matters because there sometimes are meeting where it is very important to know how much time you have to prepare appropriately. As long as the expectations are set beforehand, it matters less.

I roughly agree with the rest of your post. "Just be punctual" is a cop out that ignores the fact that I need to have enough breaks between meetings before I can even think about being punctual. Make space for breaks and enforce the time allocated is imo the solution, it matters less where exactly the 5-minute break fits (but I tend to agree that people would more likely end on the full hour, so that would mean we need to start 5 past).