Practical guide
Most bad meetings are not badly run. They are meetings that should not have existed, run competently.
There is a category of meeting where eight people spend an hour, nothing is decided, and everyone agrees to discuss it further next week. The cost is roughly a full working day of salary, and it repeats fortnightly.
Fixing this is less about facilitation technique than about being willing to not have the meeting, and being willing to end it when the decision has been made rather than when the hour is up.
The method
Each step removes one decision from the daily version, so the thing you do every day is as small as possible.
The invite should say what will be decided or produced: decide whether we launch in October or November. If you cannot write that sentence, you do not have a meeting, you have a status update, and a status update should be a written message. This single test removes more wasted time than any other change.
Every additional attendee lengthens the meeting and lowers the chance of a decision. Anyone who only needs to know the outcome gets the notes instead. Being left off an invite feels political only if your organisation treats invites as status, which is itself worth fixing.
One page, sent the day before, with the options and the recommendation. If people arrive without having read it, spend the first five minutes reading it in silence instead of presenting it aloud. Presenting a document to people who could read it is the single most expensive habit in meeting culture.
Most meetings that fail to reach a decision fail because nobody knew whose call it was. Say it in the first minute: this is Ana's decision, we are here to give her what she needs. Consensus is not required, and waiting for it is how you get another meeting.
When the conversation moves to an adjacent interesting problem, say so and park it: that is a real issue and it is not this decision, I am putting it on the list. This is the actual work of chairing, and it is uncomfortable exactly twice before it becomes normal.
In the last two minutes, say the decision aloud, name who owns the next step, and give a date. Then end, even with twenty minutes left. Meetings that fill their allotted time teach people that the calendar governs the work, not the other way around.
The hard part
Every recurring meeting has at least one of these, and the fix is a sentence, not a policy.
Deleting meetings
Take your recurring meetings and ask one question of each: if this stopped happening tomorrow, what would actually break? Not what would feel odd, what would break.
For most recurring meetings the honest answer is nothing, or something that a written update would cover. Cancel them for a month rather than forever, which makes the decision reversible and therefore much easier to get agreement on. Almost none come back.
The status meeting is the usual candidate. Its real function is often that someone does not trust that work is happening, which is a management problem wearing a calendar invite as a disguise.
Where we fit
We build Cadence, so this is a disclosure and not advice.
Cadence has a reviewed course on running meetings, in short daily lessons. Meetings are a good fit for the daily format because you get roughly one meeting a day to practise on, so a lesson in the morning has somewhere to go by the afternoon.
There is also a course on using your calendar deliberately, which is the other half of the problem for anyone whose week is already consumed by other people's invitations.
See it in concrete terms
These Cadence courses cover meetings and the calendar around them, one lesson at a time.
Turn meetings into decisions, owners, and next steps instead of another hour of context sharing.
Use your calendar to make tradeoffs, energy, deadlines, and recovery visible instead of just storing meetings.
Protect meaningful work blocks without pretending meetings, Slack, and team obligations will disappear.
Questions
Write the decision the meeting will produce into the invite. If you cannot write that sentence, the meeting is a status update and should be a written message instead. Then invite only the people who decide, send context in advance, name who has the call, and end when the decision is made, not when the hour is up.
The people who make or directly inform the decision. Everyone else gets the notes. Each extra attendee makes the meeting longer and a decision less likely, and treating invitations as a status signal is a habit worth fixing instead of accommodating.
Name the drift and park it out loud: "that is a real issue and it is not this decision, I am adding it to the list". Waiting for the conversation to come back on its own does not work. It feels uncomfortable roughly twice, then becomes an ordinary part of chairing.
Shorter than the default your calendar offers, and finished as soon as the decision is made. Ending twenty minutes early is a feature. Meetings that reliably fill their slot teach people that the calendar governs the work, not the other way around.
Ask what would break if each recurring meeting stopped tomorrow, and be strict about the difference between breaking and feeling odd. Cancel the candidates for a month rather than permanently, which makes it reversible and much easier to agree to. Most never come back.
Last reviewed
Sources reviewed
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