The art of pre-meeting chatter

The classic post “Numbers to know for managing software teams” says:

4 – the number of minutes to spend on chit chat in the beginning of a meeting

So what should be talked about during those four minutes? I have strong opinions.

The worst ideas are also the most popular. Don’t ever ask about:

• ❌ Anything related to the weekend. “Anyone have any fun weekend plans?” and “Anyone do anything fun last weekend?” are the two of the three heads of Cerberus, standing guard at the entrance to small talk hell. Most people don’t know about their own weekends and don’t care about anyone else’s. These questions usually create a pregnant pause begging to be filled with “alrighty, let’s go ahead and get things started here.”
• ❌ Anything related to the weather, unless someone’s in the middle of a once-in-a-decade weather phenomenon. Talk of weather only leads to more talk of weather, and nobody wants to know that it’s colder than it ought to be in March. (This is the third head of Cerberus, if that was bugging you.)

The goal is to start an interesting conversation. In general, any topic you can bring up every week (like weekend plans or weather updates) should be avoided.

Instead, look for unique and situational topics based on what you’re seeing as people join the meeting.

A few random examples from real meetings I’ve had in the past couple weeks:

• Someone wrote in the zoom chat that they were off camera while making breakfast, so I asked if they’re a milk and cereal kind of person or if they’re actually up cooking every day like a weirdo. That led to a fun chat about the appropriate amount of eggs to eat (my answer: however many you can hold in one hand) and what egg toppings are acceptable vs. heresy.
• Someone had a Rubik’s cube behind them that I hadn’t seen before, so I asked if that was decorative or if they could solve it. The group then spent a few minutes talking about how to keep your hands busy on calls and how our kids are better at things than we are.
• When zoom opened, I had the classic “oh crap, first meeting of the day and my hair is a wreck but I can’t fiddle with it without everyone seeing me” conundrum. So I just said that out loud and it was so relatable that everyone jumped in. We talked through various strategies: emergency hats on standby, apps that show you on webcam before opening zoom (Raycast now supports this!), and going bald.

Those were some fun conversations.