EA Global Meetings Can Be Short
TL;DR: EA Global meetings have a default time, but you can skip to the goal of the meeting and avoid the urge to fill the entire allotted time.
Background
I had a meeting with Lizka. It was 7 minutes. In the remaining time, we grabbed food, and decided to write this post together.
What was in our meeting?
Me: “How about adding [some mysterious feature] to nudge people to write summaries for their posts?”
Lizka:
Me: “We have time left, wanna write a post called EAG Meetings Can Be Short?”
Lizka: “Can we have an image in there?”
Main Takeaways
EAG meetings can be short, have images, meta jokes, and have a concrete result, such as something new posted to the Forum.
Love that, much wow!
(comments can also be short)
If you’re going to have a meeting this short, isn’t it better to e.g. send a message or email about this? Having very short conversations like this means you’ve wasted a large slot of time on your EAG calendar that you could have used for different types of conversations that you can only do in person at EAG.
I agree!
I try sending enough context in my initial message for the other person to give a response, or at least to decide if it’s relevant or refer me to someone more relevant.
Lizka scheduled with me anyway, probably because we spoke online and hardly ever met
You can also help make short meetings happen by saying, “I’d love to talk about X. I think it’ll probably take about 15 minutes, but I’m happy to meet for the default half hour if we find we have more to talk about!”
HOWEVER if you offer a shorter meeting like this, make sure you do actually give your interlocutor a chance to gracefully exit after 15 minutes. They’ll be grateful you kept to your word!
I opened this to make sure the length estimate was short, discovered it was short, and couldn’t help reading it.
I think I learned something.
This is hilarious. I would in addition love a full article on how to best write the summary and the epistemic thesis/effort etc. at the top of forum posts...pictures would be preferred
I agree. I had a few meetings where both parties politely agreed it could be cut short, and I was very grateful every time.
A thing I say to cut meetings short, when I think that would make sense:
This actually happened to me as well!
Both parties agreed the meeting’s goals were accomplished and we continued with our EAG
Epistemic Status: We tried this once.
And technically this meeting did take the entire allotted time, because we wrote the post. 🤷♂️