How to Decide If You Should Even Have a Meeting

Ultimize. Before you schedule your next meeting, pause for 10 seconds and run this filter. Is there a decision that needs to be made? Do multiple people need to interact to make that decision? And does it need to happen live? If the answer to any one of those questions is no, don't Schedule a meeting. Most meetings exist out of habit. Let's sync, let's touch base, let's go over this. Those sound reasonable, but they don't justify pulling multiple people into the same block of time. I've seen this with teams where someone like Karen schedules a weekly status meeting. 8 people join, each gives an update, and the meeting ends exactly where it started. No decision, no change in direction, just time used. The entire meeting could have been handled with a shared document or a short message. Now compare that to a situation where there's a real decision to be made. 2 teams disagree on a deadline. Engineering says it will take 3 weeks. Sales is promising deliver in 2 weeks. Oh boy, that requires discussion. That requires trade-offs. That requires a decision. That's a meeting. That's worth a meeting. The mistake is using meetings for information sharing only. Meetings are expensive. They interrupt work. They require coordination. They take focused time away from individuals. That cost only makes sense when something needs to be resolved in real time. If you just need to inform people, send a message. If you need input but not discussion, collect it asynchronously. If you need a decision that requires interaction, then, then you bring people together. So before anything goes on your calendar, use that filter. I'm begging you, please use the filter. Decision. Interaction. Live. If it doesn't meet all 3, don't— I repeat, don't have the meeting. That one habit will remove a significant number of unnecessary meetings from your schedule. And wow, wouldn't that be great to have fewer meetings?