A meeting budget works when it caps the team’s recurring load, counts in person-hours, and has one named person who says no when it is spent. It fails when it is written as a per-person quota, because then the person with the least power in the room is the one who runs out of budget first and has to decline a director to stay inside it. ...
A meeting policy that is still working in month three has three properties the ones that die do not. It is written down somewhere a new person finds it without asking. It has an exception process that existed before the first exception. And somebody senior has been visibly inconvenienced by it, in public, at least once. ...
The asynchronous meeting is not a meeting. It is a document with a deadline attached, and the useful question is not whether your team is async-first — it is which of the eleven recurring meetings on your calendar survive being written down, and what each conversion costs somebody. ...
Almost every team meeting agenda is written for a room that has already been decided. The invite list came first, the agenda came Tuesday night, and the agenda’s job is to fill the hour the room was booked for. Written that way it can improve a meeting, but it cannot change who is in it. ...
There is a specific meeting this post is about. Everyone in it privately thinks it has stopped being useful. Nobody will say so, because saying so means telling the person who set it up that the thing they set up has stopped being useful. So it runs every Thursday, at reduced attendance, and it will run until someone leaves the company. ...
Getting out of one standing meeting is a personal manoeuvre and the exit message covers it. This is the other thing: reviewing the whole recurring set on a schedule, as a team, so that meetings stop accumulating by default. They accumulate because creating a standing meeting takes four minutes and ending one requires somebody to volunteer an opinion about somebody else’s work. The asymmetry is the entire mechanism. No individual meeting is the problem; the absence of any moment at which the set gets questioned is. ...
Four roles belong in a working meeting: the person who decides, the people who have to agree, the people who hold information the decision needs, and the person keeping the record. Everyone else is there to be informed, and being informed is not a reason to spend an hour. ...
A meeting you dislike is not evidence of anything. A meeting that fails one of four specific tests is, and each failure has exactly one sensible repair. Run the four questions, take the repair they point at, and if the meeting fails the fourth one, stop repairing it and end it. ...
Advice about declining meetings is almost always written by someone with an interest in you declining more of them. That is not a conspiracy; it is just that the people producing the advice are mostly selling calendar software, and their post has to end at a signup button rather than at a complication. ...
Most meeting advice offers two options: attend, or decline. Almost everything useful happens between them. The reason to care about the middle is not squeamishness. It is that a partial exit is often the better outcome on the merits — you keep the part of the meeting that was doing something and drop the part that was not — and it is granted at a far higher rate, because nobody has to concede anything. An organiser who would refuse “I’m coming off this” will readily agree to “I’ll join for the budget item”. ...