General principles
Many meetings are a waste of time. Don’t waste people’s time.
Meetings that are worth your time need an objective with a clear agenda to hit that objective. Skip meetings that don’t.
Understand what type of meeting you need and plan accordingly.
Good Meetings
Top 3
I’ve found it very useful to bookend each week with a lightweight process that I call Top 3. The goal is to list out the top 3 things I plan to accomplish that week. This isn’t an exhaustive list of all the tasks — it’s a forcing function of focus.
Types of Meetings
The type of meeting you are in will dictate how you manage it.
Decision making
Questions to pose
The What & Why: Is everyone aligned on the problem?
The How: Is everyone aligned on the solution?
The When: Is everyone aligned on the timeline?
The Who: Is everyone aligned the people who owns driving the solution and who is going to tell us we’re done?
https://hbr.org/1967/01/the-effective-decision
Retrospective
Problem-solving
1:1
Reduce 1:1 frequency to reflect the product decision frequency. Don’t default to weekly 1:1s unless live decisions are really needed every week.
Anti Meetings
Status updates: 90% of the time these types of meetings should be done asynchronously. The 10% is for customer-facing updates which are really a forum for feedback.
References
6 types of meetings you need (and 3 you can skip) A Summary of High Output Management by Andy Grove