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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t the point of TFA that meetings _unavoidably_ run 5 minutes late, and so starting at 0:05 will avoid being impacted by the previous meeting?

I see two flaws:

1) This only works as long as nobody else does it. If the meeting prior to yours follows the same strategy then you’re in the same position as today

2) it starts 5 minutes later but has no plan for ending 5 minutes earlier, which means the next meeting will have to start at 0:10…

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To me ending at 0:55 is a million times more logical than starting at 0:05… and if there was an issue then rolling back to 0:50, or 0:45, or whatever it takes for honest accounting and/or meeting discipline to emerge.

Decades ago at an engineering firm I worked for it was baked into the groupware settings.

The smelly basement nerd running IT seemed normal back then, but here are in 2026… Turns out he was an unsung smelly genius ahead of his time. A giant among men who bathe.

Meetings running over is avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.

I work with a PM who is notorious for meetings running long. People just start hanging up while she’s talking if they have another meeting to go to. When she start hearing a bunch of beeps of people leaving, she starts to get the message that she needs to continue on the next meeting and stop. People are tired of it and don’t entertain it anymore, as much as she keeps trying to talk.

Meetings are avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.

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