Create Your Best Meeting Ever
“Meetings have become weapons of mass dysfunction.” Rebecca Hinds, PhD
Attendance is not engagement.
Tolerance of bad meetings is permission for more.
Create Your Best Meeting
#1. Cut Your Meeting Debt (Volume)
The most powerful meeting skill is knowing when not to meet.
Take back calendar control. Run a calendar cleanse. Delete all recurring meetings. Re-add only those that earn it.
Audit every meeting by impact vs. effort.
#2. Measure What Actually Matters (Measurement)
Stop using attendance, duration, or “calendar fullness” as success metrics.
Measure meetings by:
- Decision quality
- Progress made
- Clarity of next actions
Ask after meetings:
- Did this change what we do next?
- Could this have been asynchronous?
Kill meetings that can’t justify their cost in outcomes.
#3. Become a Meeting Minimalist (Structure)
Strip meetings to essentials.
- Cap attendance (smaller is better).
- Shorten default meeting lengths.
- Limit agenda items.
- End recurring meetings by default unless renewed.
- Rename meetings so the purpose is unmistakable.
- Remove people who don’t actively contribute.
Move status updates out of meetings.
Use meetings only for:
- Decisions
- Conflict
- Sense-making
Tip: Eliminate meetings that exist only to compensate for broken information flow.
#4. Design for Engagement (User-Centric Design)
- Clarify who the meeting is for.
- Design for participation, not spectatorship.
- Rotate facilitation.
- Build in moments for thinking, not just talking.
- End with explicit decisions or commitments.
#5. Use Technology Intentionally (Technology)
Tools don’t fix bad design.
- Stop defaulting to video.
- Reduce slide dependency.
- Use AI to: summarize decisions and track action items.
If a meeting doesn’t earn its place, it shouldn’t exist.
What’s one way to make your meetings better?
This post is adapted from Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done by Rebecca Hinds, PhD.
What’s one way to make your meetings better?
Create the agenda using questions? “What should we present at the ABC conference?”
Meetings should also include opportunities to build and strengthen relationships.
Anything that moves people from talking to action and strengthens relationships would improve most meetings.
Thank you for this – I added a note to my 1×1 prompts for “What are you not able to do alone” to help generate topics to take to a team meeting and generate insights into where support is needed. (I’ll wordsmith the question a bit to flip to the positive/action focused.)
Love the inquiry. It seems like some vulnerability will be necessary. Makes me think that strong teams practice vulnerability.
Dan, I basically agree with you – I don’t dispute anything you said, but I do think bringing people together is very important – you can’t build relationships virtually. I think you need to get people together to hash out ideas to move forward (yes), but I also think it is important for people to come together and catch up for a minute – this also builds relationships. Meetings should have purpose…but there is something powerful that occurs when people get together and I think we are losing this in our current culture. Meetings should not waste time and they should be directional…but sometimes I do share things that could be just as easily done virtually…but often times the item on a face to face agenda leads to a deeper conversation…which doesn’t usually occur virtually. Thanks again for your postings – I do enjoy them.
Thanks for this reflection, Travis. I hear you saying that just meeting face-to-face has value. This post is based on the new book, Your Best Meeting Ever. The material inspired me to write my own thoughts on meetings. I’m posting them next week. I’ll look forward to your feedback then as well.
PS sometimes “wasting time” isn’t a waste.
For a recurring meeting, maybe discuss whether the frequency works. A weekly meeting can be moved to biweekly, biweekly to monthly, monthly to quarterly.
And a pro tip: if the meeting frequency gets reduced, schedule that time in your calendar anyway. If it goes from weekly to biweekly, add a biweekly meeting in that time for the off weeks. People already know you are busy weekly at that time. Might as well keep it that way and have time to get work done without interruption.
Instead of trying to figure out what works for people, ask them.
I’m a huge fan of blocking time to get work done. When others see your calendar it’s important to get it on there or they will book you up. I hear the voice of experience in your insights.