12 ways to make meetings suck
1 min readApr 13, 2021
Sometimes we’re so prone to failure that advice sticks better when inverted. Here’s a list of ways to waste everyone’s time at a meeting—so we can all do better.
- Have a meeting instead of sending an email. Or thinking for yourself.
- Don’t provide an agenda for the meeting in advance.
- If someone does send an agenda and supporting documents before the meeting, skip them. Just ask for someone to bring you up to speed when the session begins.
- The more, the merrier. Invite everyone who might know something about or be interested in the topic.
- Practice bikeshedding, aka Parkinson’s law of triviality: spend most of the time on minor but easy-to-grasp issues, neglect challenging tasks with high impact.
- Leave the most important topics until the end of the meeting.
- Interrupt people when they speak, especially when they’re on-topic.
- Those who are not speaking probably don’t have anything to say, so don’t ask for their opinion.
- Talk at length about a tangential issue that’s irrelevant to the agenda.
- Contribute a personal anecdote as hard evidence.
- Make decisions in line with the HIPPO: highest-paid person’s opinion.
- Meeting notes and action steps? Don’t bother.