You don't have to spend 20% of your time waiting for somebody to show up! That's an organization culture issue.
For the daily team coordination meeting I run, we had a problem with that. So after one especially egregious delay, I asked how people felt about that. They didn't like it, of course. I then said I wanted a consistent start time, but was open as to when it was. At the hour? 1 minute after? 5 minutes after?
To my surprise, they picked 1 minute after. And everybody has stuck to it. A couple months in we'll occasionally have somebody turn up late, but the meeting starts without them, so they know not to do it again. It's great!
We also build an agenda on the fly, keeping the pace brisk. Usually we finish a few minutes early, and sometimes the meeting will be a zippy 10-15 minutes. It's possible to have good, useful meetings!
Funnily enough, my zippy meetings are the ones where an agenda, or at least a boundary, is set out in advance. Oftentimes we allocate more time than is needed to discuss, so we call it off the moment we're done instead of filling the time.
Part of this is because I'm also fine with interrupting and telling people to take something async if a group meeting is becoming a hyper-specific 1:1.
Soon enough, meetings remain direct and rabbit-hole free. Unless the entire purpose of the meeting was to collectively burrow into it.
All it takes is a little discipline, and clear expectations.
I'd suggest you read about managerialism, our reigning business paradigm. Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism" really opened my eyes. If you think of management's purpose as making the business better, there's a lot that doesn't make sense. But it gets clearer if you think of it as caste dedicated to both individual and class power and enrichment, who also try to keep the business on the rails enough that there's something to have power over and extract money from.
Not that all managers are bad or anything; plenty of them are people just trying to get things done. It's a structural problem.
I think we agree. For me, the daily team coordination meeting has a clear initial agenda: go through each work-in-process item and quickly discuss it.
But that tends to spin off longer discussions, and there are often short things people want to raise with the team. So after we've gone through our kanban board, we'll have an optional period called "post". Long items go into Zoom chat as "Post: thing to discuss" and we give a few minutes to each.
I totally agree with blocking rabbit holes. Things that interrupt the fast run-through of the board get booted to post. Items there that are longer than a few minutes get booted to async or a topic-specific meeting, generally a smaller group than the team meeting.
One other trick I recommend: rotate leadership of the meeting once people have the hang of it. I ran mine myself for the first couple months. Then I ran it every other week, with somebody new swapping in. The weeks when people are responsible for keeping the meeting on track make them much better participants when they're not in charge.
Before everyone kind of expected ~3 minutes of lateness to be the norm, dependent on elevator and stairway congestion. And god forbid one person is traveling from another meeting in another building a bit of a walk away.
Tons of meetings are just fine with being 30 minutes. And even if we schedule something longer we should expect to give people time back if we don’t need the whole thing.
Way too many 39 minute things get scheduled for 60. While there logistics issues at physical events with multiple tracks I feel most conference talks should be 30 minutes too.
For the daily team coordination meeting I run, we had a problem with that. So after one especially egregious delay, I asked how people felt about that. They didn't like it, of course. I then said I wanted a consistent start time, but was open as to when it was. At the hour? 1 minute after? 5 minutes after?
To my surprise, they picked 1 minute after. And everybody has stuck to it. A couple months in we'll occasionally have somebody turn up late, but the meeting starts without them, so they know not to do it again. It's great!
We also build an agenda on the fly, keeping the pace brisk. Usually we finish a few minutes early, and sometimes the meeting will be a zippy 10-15 minutes. It's possible to have good, useful meetings!