How to design meetings that move things forward (not waste your time)

I’ll never forget the first time I heard someone say, “This meeting could’ve been an email.” You can probably imagine exactly the voice they said it in (and what their face looked like). You’re probably heard it many times yourself. 

The meeting in question was a project check-in with multiple departments, where we’d spent an hour listening to one person giving an update that could have been written in a few bullet points. The rest of us just sat there, nodding along, waiting for it to end.