Author Topic: Feedback on just launched project? Little app for crunching meeting stats.  (Read 1513 times)

khizr

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 64
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Colorado
I just wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that launched Friday, I’d love any feedback you all might have too!

We built this cool little tool that crunches 12 months of online calendar data and shows you how much of your life you spend in meetings + your meeting habits
-> https://execution.com/free-meeting-stats/

You can see an example report it creates here (this one is mine) -> https://app.execution.com/report/2c2754f

What do you think?

We are going to dig into a company version next that will be a paid product. The goal is to show the organization how much time is spent in meetings and the cost and then work to reduce ineffective meetings and coach away bad habits. Plus we can do some cool stuff like enforce that company's meeting culture, such as not allowing meetings on certain days and so on.

khizr

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 64
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Colorado
anyone get a chance to try it? Depressing or fun :)?

katethekitcat

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 35
For context, my current job is in management consulting.

Unfortunately can't try it because I have client data on my work calendar. I read your privacy guarantee, but it's too big of a risk and too little of a reward to try. Risk: somehow my client data gets compromised and we lose millions of dollars in a data breech. (Might even be against some of our contracts to use.) Reward: I find out I have too many meetings?

Thinking this concept through: I use my calendar to do things like block off work time for myself, accept meetings I MIGHT go to depending on if I find them valuable, and to keep track of what other people are working on (e.g. they invite me but I don't attend). How does your analysis account for this?

Looking at the meeting stats you gave me: I'm not sure how this could actually help me change my behavior. A meeting is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is a recurring meeting. Things like meetings not starting on time, however - now that's a problem. Also, some meetings are VERY important, but these results have no way to distinguish good from bad.

I can also already prevent people from scheduling on my calendar just by blocking off times I'm available. This is an Outlook feature.

Not saying THIS IS TERRIBLE ABANDON IDEA - just some things I think of when I look at this. As your idea stands, I personally feel low motivation to use it. Beyond "I spend a lot of time in meetings" or "I don't," there aren't many other categories.


khizr

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 64
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Colorado
For context, my current job is in management consulting.

Unfortunately can't try it because I have client data on my work calendar. I read your privacy guarantee, but it's too big of a risk and too little of a reward to try. Risk: somehow my client data gets compromised and we lose millions of dollars in a data breech. (Might even be against some of our contracts to use.) Reward: I find out I have too many meetings?

Thinking this concept through: I use my calendar to do things like block off work time for myself, accept meetings I MIGHT go to depending on if I find them valuable, and to keep track of what other people are working on (e.g. they invite me but I don't attend). How does your analysis account for this?

Looking at the meeting stats you gave me: I'm not sure how this could actually help me change my behavior. A meeting is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is a recurring meeting. Things like meetings not starting on time, however - now that's a problem. Also, some meetings are VERY important, but these results have no way to distinguish good from bad.

I can also already prevent people from scheduling on my calendar just by blocking off times I'm available. This is an Outlook feature.

Not saying THIS IS TERRIBLE ABANDON IDEA - just some things I think of when I look at this. As your idea stands, I personally feel low motivation to use it. Beyond "I spend a lot of time in meetings" or "I don't," there aren't many other categories.
Just to be clear, the only thing the data hits is the memory as we tabulate the results and then memory is cleared out per normal server operations. We even kill the access token so we can't ever access it again. We do not store anything beyond the email associated with the account and a tabulation, so there is no private data in there.

Yep, we scrub any events with just one person on them, and all day events to account for that.

This was more a fun project to show some cool stats, raise awareness, and start some conversations at the office. Plus we are working on a paid product aimed at the business level so the business can use this to see all the meetings happening at their organization and use this to optimize/reduce/combine. We've got some other ideas inside of that we are testing with some early partners and a bunch of interviews with Product/Operations people. We think there might be something useful in there with rating meetings and feeding that back into analytics, and some software/human-driven coaching as well.

Yep, just a fun free project to show some cool data and test the APIs :). The next step is a business level project to keep meetings under control.

Thanks, Ben