Let’s Start at the Beginning

Last Summer our founders had a big weekend planned. Old friends getting together, lots of drinks, sun, and beach time. The long tail of Covid seemed to have other plans.

Quarantined in the basement, with more time than symptoms, they passed the hours on zoom with one another. Being on a conference call they couldn’t help but reflect on the absurdity of how much of their time is spent in meetings. Like most of us, to look at their calendars was to look at a game of Tetris run amok. How many of those meetings really accomplished anything? How much time did they really have to think and do meaningful work?

Start-up “guys” by nature, they also looked at all these meetings through the lens of the limited resources that small companies often operate with. The most valuable asset any company has is its people and their time. Yet, how much time is taken up by poorly run meetings, or recurring meetings that most of us sleep-walk into, barely remembering why we have them in the first place. While this is not unique to small companies but any stretch, the limited resources in a small or growth company amplify this issue.

This led them to the thinking: Is there tool out there that shows me how much time people spend in meetings? Or how much meetings cost a company? In looking around there wasn’t much. So they started playing around with Google Calendar APIs and Meeting Metrix began to take shape.

As they began to show what they had to friends and colleagues another realization came to light. There is a host of untapped insights just waiting to be mined in people’s calendars. Again, having worked and run many small companies, sometimes the hardest thing to know is what the hell is going on? What are people doing? How come we can’t seem to move the needle? Sometimes the simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

The usual solution here is some form of status reporting or (sic!) time tracking software. While effective, this is a burden on everyone and oftentimes met with some resistance. What’s more is that information is already sitting in peoples calendars. We just need an easy way to get at it, view it, and make it actionable.

That’s what Meeting Metrix is about. The goal is to leverage the data that people are feeding into their calendars and surface it in a way to help them spend their time more wisely. They can use our calendar analytics to gain visibility into what’s happening around them. Kill off bad meetings. Find time to create value and move the damn needle already!