The meeting test
I keep a running note titled "meetings that should not have existed." It has forty-three entries this year. Two are from last week.
Not one of them was catastrophic. That's not the point. The point is that each ate an hour of my day and returned nothing that couldn't have been resolved in a two-line email. Multiply that across a team of ten, a company of a hundred, and the invisible cost is enormous. The biggest expense on most teams' P&L isn't on the P&L. It's the calendar.
I don't have a system for eliminating bad meetings entirely — I don't think one exists — but I have a filter. It takes ninety seconds. It has cut my meetings by roughly a third since I started using it, and, more importantly, has stopped me from accepting other people's invites that were going to waste both our time.
Before you accept or schedule a meeting, ask three questions. If the answer to any of them is no, the meeting should not exist as scheduled. Cancel it. Change the format. Push it out.
The first: is there a decision that has to come out of this? Not "we should sync." Not "let's align." A decision — something where a specific person needs to say yes or no by the end. If there's no decision, the meeting is a status update in disguise, which is what email was invented for.
The second: are the people who can make that decision going to be in the room? If the decider is out, or hasn't been invited, or is delegating, the meeting will produce a recommendation at best, and probably not that. It exists to reach a decision without the decider — which means it can't reach one. Push it.
The third — and this one catches the most cases — does the outcome depend on real-time back-and-forth? Is there a live exchange, a debate, something that needs the pressure and speed of talking? If not, the meeting is a slow, expensive way to read something. Write it up. Send it. Let people respond on their own time. You will get sharper responses that way, and nobody has to block ninety minutes on Thursday.
Most meetings fail one of the three. Some fail all three, and those you can see from a mile away.
The version I actually run for my own calendar is even shorter. I ask: what will exist at the end of this meeting that does not exist now? If I can't answer in one sentence, the meeting doesn't need to happen. If the sentence is something like "a shared understanding," it also doesn't need to happen — shared understanding is a nice output, not an outcome anyone can actually measure or act on.
Two weeks of running this filter and you start to notice something uncomfortable. Most of the meetings on your calendar were put there by people who never asked these questions. Including you.
That's a good thing to notice.
— K