Introduction
Meetings are a paradox. Everyone hates them, yet everyone spends their days in them. If meetings take so much space on our calendars, it's not because they're all necessary - it's because they're often poorly designed.
The first step is obviously to reduce the number of meetings. The criteria is simple: if you were sick, would the meeting still happen? If yes, it's probably necessary. If not, it can likely be replaced by a written message or a short recap.
But once useless meetings are removed, one essential question remains: how do you make the meetings that are left actually effective?
Rule #1: zero lateness
A meeting scheduled for 9:00 AM that starts at 9:15 didn't "lose" 15 minutes. It made 15 minutes disappear for every participant. In a six-person meeting, that's already 90 minutes of team time wasted.
The only effective solution is to start on the dot, no matter what. If you're organizing the meeting, arrive early to handle potential technical issues. It's better for one person to invest a few minutes in preparation than to waste everyone's time.
Starting on time is also a strong cultural signal. It shows that collective time is valuable and should be respected.
Rule #2: one screen only - the facilitator's (or note-taker's)
Meetings are a natural enemy of focus. The moment a laptop or phone is on the table, multitasking starts. And as Carlson's law explains, doing two things in parallel always takes longer than doing them one after the other.
Checking email during a meeting feels productive, but it actually degrades attention quality and slows everyone down. It's also a respect issue: a meeting requires being fully present with others.
As the organizer, it's your job to set this rule. Some teams go as far as placing phones in the middle of the table or closing all laptops. It sounds extreme, but the effect is immediate.
Rule #3: the two-pizza rule
Popularized at Amazon, this rule is simple: never run a meeting where you'd need to order more than two pizzas to feed everyone. Concretely, that means six people max.
Beyond that threshold, group dynamics degrade. Some people talk too much, others stop talking entirely, and decision-making slows down dramatically. People who aren't essential can be updated afterward via a summary email.
Limiting participants is one of the most powerful ways to improve collective efficiency.
Rule #4: 30 minutes max
Meetings are especially vulnerable to Parkinson's law: work expands to fill the time available. A meeting scheduled for two hours will take two hours, even if decisions could have been made in thirty minutes.
The shorter the meeting, the easier it is to maintain high attention. Better 30 minutes of real focus than one hour where everyone slowly checks out.
Some topics are more vulnerable to this effect, especially brainstorms. Creative discussions can become endless. In that case, it's better to handle structured topics first and keep open-ended discussions for the end.
Structure to avoid drift
Beyond these rules, some best practices are obvious - and still too often forgotten.
An effective meeting always starts with a clear agenda, sent in advance and repeated at the beginning. Without explicit constraints, discussions almost always drift.
During the meeting, the organizer's job is to pull the group back from tangents. If an interesting but out-of-scope topic comes up, write it down somewhere visible to handle later - without interrupting the main flow.
Finally, a meeting should always end with clear decisions, next steps, and deadlines. No need for a long recap; a few structured bullet points are enough.
These principles match what we covered in explicit communication: being clearer upfront prevents a lot of useless back-and-forth later.
Schedule the next step immediately
One last point matters. At the end of a meeting, teams often postpone scheduling the next one. That's a classic mistake linked to present bias: we value current constraints more than future ones.
But setting the next date immediately, when everyone is present and has their calendar open, takes far less time than coming back to it later by email.
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