Learn How to Have Meetings Before Having Meetings

Key Points Summary

• Meetings are for solving problems. Period. Most meetings are held to solve a specific problem. If there is no problem to be solved, you probably don't need a meeting.
• Decentralize Everything You Can. A meeting is a synchronous, centralized event. To make it efficient, you must identify every component of the process that can be handled asynchronously and decentralized before the meeting begins.
• Preparation is Everything. Meticulous preparation is non-negotiable. A poorly prepared meeting will always be a failed meeting, either in its process or its outcome. There are no exceptions.
• Sync Asynchronously. "Information sharing" is not a meeting agenda item. All background reading and syncing up must be done asynchronously before the meeting. The meeting room is not the place to read a document for the first time.
• Protect Synchronous Time. The meeting itself must be focused exclusively on tasks that can only be accomplished through live, synchronous collaboration, such as debate, complex problem-solving, and final decision-making.

Meeting Dilemma: An "Internal Product" on the Verge of Collapse

From a company's perspective, the importance of meetings cannot be overstated.

Think of meetings as a company's most critical "internal product." It's the one with the highest "user" engagement, consuming the most employee time, and having the greatest impact on both output and morale.

And yet, what I find both shocking and deeply unsettling is that in many companies, this essential product is perpetually on the brink of collapse.

I recently saw a colleague's calendar. It was so packed back-to-back with meetings that I genuinely couldn't figure out when they did any work that wasn't a meeting.

The explosion in the quantity of meetings is one thing. But the shocking state of their quality is the real crisis. When it comes to the experience of "a meeting," I'm sure you'll recognize at least one of the following scenes:

• Your day is a relentless series of "status updates," "weekly syncs," "alignment calls," "brainstorms," and "reviews." You spend all day talking about work and only start your "real" work at night (unless, of course, your job is meetings).
• The most common reason for a meeting is the vague, meaningless phrase: "We just need to get aligned on this."
• The meeting is scheduled to start, but several people are missing. The host says, "Let's just give them five more minutes," and then starts pinging them.
• A senior leader is late, forcing everyone to make awkward, non-work-related small talk until they arrive. When the leader finally joins, they'll almost certainly ask for a "quick recap," forcing the group to repeat everything that was just discussed.
• The first agenda item is "Let me sync a few updates" or "Let me give some background"—information that should have been in a pre-read document.
• The presenter simply reads a document out loud to the room, word for word, often one filled with internal jargon and acronyms that they then have to explain one by one.
• There are twenty people on the invite, but only two or three are actually talking. The rest are either silently checking their phones or typing away on their laptops.
• You might be that person who hasn't said a word, because you realized 15 minutes in that this meeting has absolutely nothing to do with you, but you feel too awkward to stand up and leave.
• You get randomly pulled into a video call that's already halfway over. You never get a chance to speak and, by the end, feel like you were just forced to listen to a random podcast.
• The meeting only ends because your room booking has expired and the next group is knocking on the door. The host pleads, "Just five more minutes!"
• You endure a four-hour marathon discussion that feels like a lot was said, but nothing was decided. The final resolution? "Let's schedule a follow-up for tomorrow to continue this."

...and the list goes on.

How do I know all this? Because I have personally experienced every single one of these failures. These aren't just annoyances; they are all symptoms that the "internal product" we call a meeting is fundamentally broken.

So, let me ask again: are you still so sure you know how to run a meeting?

The Meeting Epidemic: No One is Innocent

It's easy to blame the explosion of low-quality meetings on the rise of modern collaboration tools, and there's a direct link. Before these apps, information was often shared via email and documents. Calling a meeting, especially a large one, had a relatively high barrier to entry; organizing a 100-person meeting was nearly impossible.

Today, even information that is perfectly suited for a document is conveyed in a meeting. A 15-minute problem is "solved" with a 30-minute call. And if you need to schedule that 100-person meeting? You don't have to check 100 calendars. You just open your app, find a slot, and blast an invite to a massive group. In under a minute, you've commandeered a hundred schedules, and none of those people have any idea why.

But are the tools really the problem? Of course not. They're just an accelerant. The reasons our calendars are full are more systemic. From an organizational perspective, meeting overload is usually a symptom of deeper issues:

• Poor Communication. When teams don't communicate effectively day-to-day, frequent meetings are used as a clumsy substitute.
• A Lack of Clear Goals. Vague objectives lead to unfocused discussions that drift aimlessly, spawning even more meetings.
• No Time Management Strategy. The organization doesn't protect time for deep work, allowing calendars to be packed with low-value syncs.
• Broken Decision-Making. Meetings are used to replace critical thinking and decision-making, not to facilitate them. The same issue is discussed over and over.
• A "Meeting Culture." In some organizations, being in meetings is a form of "performative work"—a way to signal your importance and dedication.
• A Lack of Basic Skills. The team lacks fundamental meeting hygiene, like setting agendas, assigning tasks, and documenting outcomes.

From an individual perspective, it's a problem of bad habits and poor methods. The convenient tools are simply a lever for our bad habits, allowing them to scale and infect the schedules of as many people as possible. Therefore, the only real solution is to change our habits.

The system I'm about to share is more than just theory. I've used it to create a concrete, actionable playbook—a method that uses "Two Questions," "One Document," "One Table," and "One Vote" to structure the entire meeting process.

The results were:

• Average meeting duration cut by over 50%.
• The average number of attendees reduced by more than 50%.
• 100% deep engagement from all participants.
• All problems were resolved on the spot.

And the qualitative feedback from the team was overwhelmingly positive:

"This is so much better than those dead, silent meetings where no one talks."

"I recommend we roll this out to the whole department."

"It's been a long time since I've collaborated with this many people who actually brought their brains to work."

Step 0: Before You Schedule, Ask Yourself: "Is This Meeting Necessary?”

A successful meeting begins long before anyone enters the room; it begins with preparation. Many people don't seem to realize that a meeting needs to be "prepared," not just "scheduled." A poorly prepared meeting will always be a failed meeting, either in its process or its outcome.

In fact, the preparation phase is every bit as important as the meeting itself.

Others might understand that prep work is needed, but they mistake logistical prep—like connecting the laptop to the monitor or setting up the video call—for the real work. While those tasks ensure the meeting can happen, they do nothing to ensure the meeting will be successful in achieving its goals or producing a quality decision.

Of all the prep work, the most critical is what I call "Step 0": challenging the very necessity of the meeting.

The fastest, most direct way to improve your meeting efficiency is to not have the meeting at all.

You can use a simple three-question filter to make the decision:

1. Define the Objective. What is the purpose of this meeting? What specific, concrete problem are we trying to solve?
2. Consider the Alternatives. Is there any possible way to solve this problem without a synchronous meeting?
3. Assess the Benefits. What is the unique advantage of gathering people live? Will it genuinely save time, improve the quality of communication, or help us make a better decision?

If you run your daily meeting requests through this filter, you’ll find that a huge percentage of them don't make the cut. For instance, many meetings are scheduled with the vague goal of "Let's discuss X" when they should have a concrete goal like "Let's decide on Y."

Even more common are the "alignment" or "sync" meetings, which often consist of one person reading a document out loud. These aren't meetings; they are memos that should have been handled asynchronously with a tool like Google Docs or Notion.

After all, what single action could boost your team's productivity more than simply eliminating every unnecessary meeting from their calendars?

Step 1: The Organizer Prepares the Meeting Document

Once you've confirmed that a problem truly requires a meeting to solve, the next step is to write the document. This document is the absolute foundation for an efficient and successful meeting. It must include, at a minimum:

1. The Problem to be Solved
2. The Current State & Context
3. Potential Approaches & Lines of Thinking
4. A Proposed Solution (or Solutions)

The process of writing this document is, in itself, a process of clarifying your own thoughts. I use this mental model when preparing it: I am explaining this entire situation to a stranger with zero background knowledge. I have to consider what I know now, what they need to know before we talk, and the clearest way to express that information.

By writing this document, the meeting organizer defines and clarifies the scope of the meeting. Sometimes, something magical happens: by the time the document is finished, you realize there is no new information that a live meeting could possibly add. Everything is already in the document. You just need to send it to the relevant people. And what's a bigger efficiency boost than canceling a meeting that's no longer necessary?

Step 2: The Document is Shared for Asynchronous Collaboration

Once the document is complete, the organizer must send it to all attendees at least two days before the meeting. Attendees are required to read it. And "reading" here doesn't mean a quick skim; it means an active, asynchronous collaboration between the organizer and the participants:

• Participants read the document to understand the topic and context. They then ask clarifying questions in the comments and challenge any points they believe are unreasonable.
• The Organizer must answer every question and continuously update the document based on the feedback and discussion.

On my team, we've made this a non-negotiable habit. The organizer sends the document at least three days in advance and creates a formal to-do item for each attendee to "Review Meeting Document," which must be completed before the meeting.

During this period, the document comes alive. The back-and-forth Q&A between the organizer and participants helps to refine the problem, add missing context, and sharpen the solution. This process is deeply intertwined with Step 0, as it continues to clarify which problems truly need to be solved and whether a meeting is the right tool for the job.

Step 3: Consolidate the True Agenda

After several rounds of asynchronous Q&A, the participants have a full understanding of the topic, and most of their questions have already been answered. The few, tough, unresolved issues that remain become the true agenda for the meeting.

The organizer's job is to summarize these outstanding problems in a simple table at the very top of the document. These are the only things that will be discussed when the meeting begins.

At this point, the pre-meeting prep work is essentially complete.

Someone once confidently asked me, "You mean you'd cancel a meeting just because there's no document?" I replied even more confidently: "Yes. No doc, no meeting."

The reason is simple: writing and reviewing the document is a way to use asynchronous, decentralized Q&A to solve all the information-gap problems ahead of time. This protects the expensive, centralized meeting time for the core, critical issues. Because the document is so detailed and all preliminary questions have been answered, it becomes the single source of truth for the entire issue. Anyone else who needs to get up to speed—like a new hire or a new team member joining the project—can simply read this one document to understand the full picture.

Another key benefit is that this prep work builds consensus and narrows the scope before the meeting starts. This allows you to limit the number of attendees to the smallest necessary group and ensures that their energy is focused only on the parts where consensus has not yet been reached.

If the problem is undefined, if no one has thought about it, and if no one has the necessary background info, what are you even meeting about? Even talk show hosts have to get their scripts reviewed in advance.

Step 4: Execute the Meeting with a Problem-Solving Focus

Because the prep phase has solved most of the informational issues and distilled the agenda down to a few specific problems, the meeting itself is purely about execution.

The team's only job is to work through the problems in the table, one by one. It's crucial that this table only contains issues that were unresolved before the meeting. Once a problem is solved, the solution is briefly noted, and the team moves to the next item.

How to handle new issues that arise during the meeting:

1. Derived Problems: Issues that are directly related to the current topic of discussion. These should be tackled immediately after the current item is resolved.
2. "Unprepared" Problems: Issues raised by someone who clearly didn't read the document thoroughly. These should be deferred until the very end, after all planned topics are resolved. This creates a strong incentive for everyone to do the prep work.

The meeting host's job is to be the guardian of focus. They must constantly ensure the discussion is centered on "solving the listed problems." If the topic begins to drift, they must immediately intervene and steer it back—be brave enough to say, "That's a tangent. Let's get back to the topic at hand."

The Outcome: A Decision and a Document with a Memory

After a meeting organized with this process, nearly every question related to the topic has been answered. At the same time, we are left with a complete and incredibly valuable document.

During the prep phase, we already outlined:

• The Problem
• The Current State
• Lines of Thinking
• Proposed Solution

Through the interactive Q&A in the comments, the document now also reflects the entire thought process, the various perspectives, and the reasons for the final decision. So, the final document contains: