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Ben Nadel at the jQuery Conference 2010 (Boston, MA) with: Ruthie BenDor
Ben Nadel at the jQuery Conference 2010 (Boston, MA) with: Ruthie BenDor ( @unruthless )

Working Code Podcast - Episode 66: Make Meetings Suck Less

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For many of us, meetings feel like a necessary evil. We love to complain that we have too many meetings; and, that most of them are useless. However, forgoing meetings and attempting to solve problems and reach consensus asynchronously can feel like even more of a drain on our time and effort. We all seem to have some degree of meeting PTSD. But, none of us is really sure what to do about it.

This week on the show, the crew talks about our love-hate relationship with meetings. And, demonstrates that we're all a little different when it comes to right-sizing our meeting agendas. For example, Carol - with her team of 20 - burns through her standup in under 30-minutes. And me - with my little team of 3 - spends the first 20-minutes of each stand-up just talking about movies. And, both of us are happy with how our stand-ups operate.

That's part of the problem - there's no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to good meetings. That said, we do all agree on a few things:

  • Silence can be golden.

  • It's OK (but hard) to leave irrelevant meetings.

  • No meeting attendee should ever have to prepare for a meeting ahead of time - don't be giving us homework! If there's a document to be read, time should be allocated at the front of the meeting to do the reading as a group.

All that and more on this week's show:

... featuring these beautiful, beautiful people:

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

For the full show notes and links, visit the episode page. And, be sure to follow the show and come chat with us on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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Ben Nadel