Early in my career, I worked in a team where every day started with a meeting. The engineering manager would walk in and gather every developer. He opened with a status update, and that part was fine. The problem was what came after.
From status, the conversation drifted into stories. Then into his past achievements. Then into a long list of issues, some ours and some not. Nobody knew when it would end, and nobody felt comfortable asking. Within a few weeks, the morning sync was taking a couple of hours every day.
The cost did not stay in the meeting room. When a development team starts real work two hours late, the work does not shrink to fit. It moves into the evening. And there was one more rule, never written but always followed: nobody on the development team left before he did. So the meeting did not just take two hours. It pushed the whole day two hours later, every day.
I did not have the words for it then. Now I would say the meeting had no job.
You have probably seen this pattern
Maybe not the same version, but something close.
You are two hours into a meeting with product, marketing, and engineering. Everyone has spoken. No decision has been made. Then the marketing manager says they will check the numbers and come back to the product team in the next meeting. The decision moves a week later, and the same people meet again to repeat the same conversation with one extra data point.
Or you open your calendar and find an invite called “Sync” or “Quick discussion.” No description, no agenda. You accept because declining feels rude, and you spend the first ten minutes working out why you are there.
These are not personality problems. They are design problems. A meeting is a tool, and a tool works when it has a clear job.
This pattern is common. In Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries, inefficient meetings ranked as the number one productivity disruptor, and too many meetings ranked third. The same research found that 55% of people said next steps at the end of meetings were unclear, and only about one in three believed they would be missed in many of the meetings they attend.
I wrote earlier about the real cost of meetings no one is tracking. That post was about the math. This one is about the fix.
If you want your own number, the meeting cost calculator turns attendees, salary band and length into a total.
Before you send the invite, give the meeting a job
A meeting earns its place when the people in the room need each other to produce something. In my experience, that comes down to four jobs.
- Decide: choose between options, with the person who owns the decision in the room.
- Discuss: work through something unclear, where each person holds part of the picture.
- Debate: test a proposal against real disagreement before committing to it.
- Develop: build something together, such as a plan, a design, or a story map.
If the meeting is only for sharing information, skip it. A status update can be a short written note, a recording, or a board the team already checks. People read faster than others talk, and they can read at a time that does not break their focus.
That morning meeting from my early career fails this test. The status part could have been a written update. The stories and self praise had no job at all. The issues were real, but none of them were decided in the room, so they came back the next morning.
One exception matters. Some information should be shared in person even when nothing needs to be decided: a reorganization, a layoff, a missed target that changes people’s work. When the news is heavy, people need to ask questions and see the faces of those delivering it. In those moments, the job of the meeting is not information. It is care.
Write the agenda as questions, not topics
Most agendas are a list of nouns: “Marketing,” “Q3 roadmap,” “Release.” A noun tells people what the meeting is about. It does not tell them what the meeting is for.
Cross out “Marketing” and write “How do we increase renewals by 10% this quarter?” Three things change.
First, people come focused. They know the problem before they walk in, so they can think before they talk.
Second, the question shows who actually needs to be there. A renewals question needs the people who own pricing, onboarding, and customer data. It probably does not need the whole engineering team.
Third, a question tells you when you are done. Once it has an answer, or a clear owner and a date for the answer, the meeting can end. A topic never ends. There is always one more thing to say about “Marketing.”
This also fixes the “I will check the stats and come back” problem. When the question is on the invite days before the meeting, the person who owns the data can bring it. The numbers arrive with the question, not a week after it.
Stop defaulting to one hour
Thirty and sixty minutes are not natural units of work. They are the default options in a calendar app. Nobody decided that a product review needs exactly one hour. The software offered it, and we clicked save.
Work fills the time you give it. A one hour slot invites one hour of talking, even when the decision was ready in twenty minutes. Try 25 minutes. Try 40. If the question needs 38 minutes, book 38. An unusual number signals that someone thought about the time, and people tend to respect it.
Shorter meetings also leave space between calls. Back-to-back calendars mean people arrive late, distracted, and still thinking about the last room. The same logic applies to the “nobody leaves before the boss” habit. Hours in a chair are not output, a point I explored in rethinking productivity in the age of AI.
How some leaders protect the room
A few well known practices are worth studying. Not to copy them whole, but to see the principle behind each one.
Write before you meet. Amazon replaced slide presentations with narratively structured six-page memos, which are read silently at the start of the meeting before discussion begins. The page count is not the point. Writing forces the presenter to think clearly before taking everyone’s time, and silent reading gives everyone the same context before anyone speaks.
Know the objective before you call the meeting. Andy Grove, who led Intel, separated regular process meetings from mission-oriented meetings called to solve one specific problem. His view was simple: the person who calls a mission meeting must know exactly what it needs to achieve. If you cannot state the outcome, you are not ready to book the room.
Reset the calendar on purpose. In January 2023, Shopify removed recurring meetings with more than two people from employee calendars, cleared Wednesdays of meetings, and limited large meetings of 50 or more people to one window on Thursdays. The company said the change freed more than 76,500 hours. It was a blunt move, and experts were divided on whether it improved anything, since meeting quality matters more than meeting count. The useful lesson is narrower: recurring meetings outlive their reason, and someone has to delete them deliberately.
When this advice does not fit
Every rule here has limits. A few worth naming:
- New teams need more time together. Early on, some meetings exist to build trust and a shared language. That is a valid job, even if it looks like “just talking.” Name it honestly.
- Remote teams lose casual context. Cutting every meeting can leave people isolated and out of sync. Protect a small number of meetings for connection.
- One-on-ones are not status meetings. They exist for the person, not the project. Do not cancel them because there is “nothing to update.”
- Some problems need a long session. A hard architecture decision or a story mapping workshop may need three hours. The rule is not “always short.” The rule is “as long as the job needs, and no longer.”
- Writing-first culture takes skill. If your team is not used to writing, a memo rule can turn into a new kind of theater. Start with a one-page pre-read before asking for six.
- Removing a meeting without a replacement creates confusion. If you cancel the weekly status call, tell people where status now lives.
There is one more limit, and it is the hardest. If the real problem is a manager who uses meetings to be seen, or a culture where nobody leaves before the boss, a better agenda will not fix it. That is a leadership problem. It needs a direct conversation, not a calendar setting. Moving into management means the job itself changes, and protecting your team’s time becomes part of it.
Three questions before every meeting
Better meetings start with three questions.
- Should we meet? If the job is only sharing information, write it instead.
- What must we accomplish? Write the answer as a question on the invite.
- How quickly can we do it? Pick the shortest time that finishes the job, not the default the calendar offers.
Looking back at that early-career team, any one of these questions would have given us hours back every week. Not because meetings are bad, but because that meeting never had a reason to exist in the first place.
Look at your calendar for this week. Which recurring meeting would not pass the first question?
If your team spends more time talking about the work than doing it, I help product and engineering teams set up meeting and decision rhythms that hold up under real delivery pressure. Let’s talk.
Tahir Shahzad
Tahir Shahzad is a Product Manager, Product Owner, and technology consultant with over a decade of experience helping startups and organizations build products people actually use. If you are working on a product problem worth solving, reach him at tahirshahzad.com/contact/
