by grayhatter | 2025-12-02 00:47:42+00:00
> As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”.

Are you sure it's not that you're just bad at leading meetings?

I ask that tongue in cheek, but my thesis is the same. How are you measuring the positive criteria for a meeting? How would you know if some variable has a meaningful impact on said metrics? Are the metrics you're tracking the same metrics others are using, and if not how do you translate them?

Most meetings lack a clearly defined success criteria. Most attendees couldn't describe this criteria, even if pressed. Given my experience, that's the root problem.

People who are trying, often use "this meeting has an agenda" as criteria for if a meeting is likely to be useful. But this is a heuristic detached from what is actually important. Meetings are about, obtaining consensus, or uncovering some truth*. If your success criteria doesn't reflect either of these. It's much more accurately described as a waste of time, rather than a meeting.

Pretend meetings aren't a thing, you're requesting a significant amount of time from a number of people. Now, on top of that, add in the cost of context switching. You're proposing a completely novel approach to solving a specific problem. Define that problem.

Most of the meetings I've attended evaporate under that criteria.

Meetings without a doubt, solve real problems. But most meetings aren't solving any problems. They're checking boxes, because that's what people expect. Which results in the pattern you describe. it's either a waste of time, or a waste of time, in the other direction.

> The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics.

It still sounds like to me, you're gauging the quality of a meeting, based mostly on the time cost. That shouldn't be considered*. Instead, assume you have infinite time. In this magical world, every sits in this room until you've arrived at [objective]. Pretend that amount of time might as well be infinite. Is the objective worth infinite time? Or can you still not describe the objective outside of the time cost?

> Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.

There's a nugget of truth, or more accurately reality behind this observation. Meetings that are rated positively, correlate strongly with context alignment. What concrete meaning have you taken from this critical observation?

If you have already have clear alignment, what impact should that have on the next meeting?

Imagine "next meeting" sounded like an absolutely ridiculous question, why would you ever consider having a "next meeting"? What a stupid question for some rando on the Internet to ask?!

Once you shift your thinking into being able to answer, why on earth, there would be a follow up meeting... You'll understand how to extract value from meetings.

Also, do note... sometimes meetings are just to hang out and shoot the shit. This might be more important than [average meeting] so don't undervalue the real benefits of spending time with coworkers! I've lost count of the number of difficult problems I've solved by casually ranting to a friend who asks smart questions. (which I take to mean, don't step on important conversations, for the sake of some bullshit agenda... try asking people if they felt like the conversations in a meeting were friendly and welcoming, see what that question does for your success criteria long term)