The Secret to Productive Meetings: How to Run Fewer & More Effective Meetings

Ding! Time for another meeting. Cue: collective groan 😩

If my stint in customer success has taught me anything, it’s that a calendar filled with meetings leaves no room for creativity, fresh ideas, or a long lunch. And I’m not alone: 80% of 5,000 respondents in a survey said they’d be more productive if they spent less time in meetings.

And excessive meetings aren’t just a productivity killer for you and your team; it’s literally hurting business. Reclaim’s research shows the average annual cost of meetings per employee is a whopping $29,129.

There’s got to be a better way. In this article, I’ll share how you can have more productive meetings without the Zoom gloom. 

Is a meeting really necessary?

“That meeting could’ve been an email” is the modern day corporate mantra for a reason. We have too many meetings and many of them are just calendar fillers, not crucial conversations.

Here’s a checklist to identify whether or not that meeting on your calendar is truly necessary:

1. You need to share sensitive information

Sensitive information can mean two things:

• Confidential client or company related information

• Difficult feedback, team restructuring, or policy changes

In the first scenario, a meeting is better if you don’t want to keep written or visual records of sharing anything private that can be misused.

In the second scenario, a meeting is ideal because some situations can trigger emotions and big questions. Dropping information in a doc and dipping away can seem insensitive. Your tone and ability to respond to your team's emotions matter in such conversations.

2. You want to explain something using your screen

Maybe you want to share how to follow protocol or use a tool, but Loom videos don’t give the whole picture. Perhaps you need to make a visual edit that’s easier to explain live than in a doc. In such scenarios, a meeting is worth it.

If you’re ever confused about whether you need a Loom or a meeting, ask yourself: Would you spend more time fielding questions and concerns if you sent a Loom instead of hashing out the whole thing live just once? If the answer is yes, conduct a meeting. Preferably record it for future reference, too.

3. You need a group opinion to resolve or discuss an issue or idea

There are many times when multiple brains can be better than one. Situations such as:

• Kicking off a new project

• Brainstorming on strategic shifts

• Making a decision to resolve an issue

• Workshopping a new plan to be more effective

• Aligning cross-functional teams on a new approach

In the above situations, your team can build upon each other’s thoughts and arrive at a conclusion faster. The dynamic energy of a team suggesting a point, debating it with a counterpoint, and finally agreeing on something strengthens interpersonal connections, too.

4. You’re short on time

Ideally, ‘urgency’ should happen infrequently, but when it does, a meeting is often much quicker than using async methods to resolve any pressing issues. If you’re worried that the async delay can hurt your business or a specific situation, resort to live meetings.

But don’t make it a habit to wait until the last minute and use meetings in the veil of urgency.

5. You tried async approaches, and it didn’t work

You’ve done everything: sent a Slack DM, a voice note, a Loom video, an email explainer. But things aren’t moving along. Move to a scheduled meeting once you’ve exhausted all the asynchronous methods.

This is especially true for recurring meetings like status updates or daily standups. 64% of regular meetings have no agenda at all 😳. Don’t set a never-ending block in your calendar unless you’re absolutely sure async methods don’t work.

5 best practices to make meetings more productive

Meetings aren’t always the villain, but poorly planned and shoddily conducted meetings are. Without a clear purpose and efficient time management, they derail productivity and drain energy. But when done right, they can be excellent tools to solve problems, foster connections, and get everyone moving in the right direction.

Follow these best practices to make the most of every minute you spend in meetings:

1. Set a meeting etiquette for your team

Meetings aren’t going anywhere. Instead of thinking of them for the short-term, zoom out (pun intended) and check how you can set the foundation of a productive meeting culture. For example, you can require all your team members to clearly outline an agenda for every meeting they add to the calendar.

An example: Dani Stewart, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Kit, shared the meeting culture accepted by the company:

“At Kit, we do our best to keep meetings to a minimum. When it can be async, we push for that. We have no meetings Tuesdays and Fridays. Sometimes a meeting will sneak on to one of those days because of scheduling conflicts, but we try to keep them extra short when they do.”

Here are some questions that can help you shape your meeting culture:

• What’s your stance on impromptu huddles? Should your team avoid them to preserve focus or use them as a tool to move faster? Outline example scenarios to help everyone understand better.

• In what instances should a meeting be rescheduled? For instance, if the main stakeholders aren’t available, should you still conduct the meeting or postpone it?

• What kind of topics or situations truly require a meeting? Explain how your team members can better understand when a meeting is necessary and when async forms would work better.

• How far in advance should meeting agendas be shared with all the participants? And is it okay to decline a meeting if it doesn’t have a clear agenda? Are there any exceptions to the rule?

• How do you handle late starts, overruns, or late shows in a meeting? Do we start things on time regardless, or do we wait for everyone to join so no one has to play catch-up later?

• Should you have a no-meeting day to focus on deep work? If yes, how do you decide whether it is company-wide or rooted in individual preferences?

• For virtual meetings, do we prefer to be camera-on or camera-off? This rule can also differ by meeting type.

• How do you store and capture meeting notes & action items? Who is responsible for following-up regarding the outcomes of a meeting?

• Do you allow the use of AI note takers or meeting recorders to be present? Can they be there to replace a person or just to aid?

These are just a few questions that can help you reflect on what you want your meeting culture to be. Even if you work independently like me, use the above prompts to establish the meeting etiquette in your onboarding process for clients.

But to truly implement your meeting culture, you not only need to embody it consistently, but also make it sticky so everyone can remember the ground rules. For instance, if you work in Todoist under a shared project, you can create a card for “Meeting ground rules” in one section and add the etiquettes as uncompletable subtasks.

Everyone can refer to this Todoist card whenever they’re unsure whether to schedule a meeting. It’s especially useful for new employees who want to understand your company's culture.

When forming your meeting guidelines, take feedback from your team. Ask what they struggle with when scheduling and attending meetings. Brainstorm with them on how you can make them more productive. Answer any questions they have in your culture file/doc/card.

2. Define a clear agenda for each meeting and share it in advance

It might sound basic, but the easiest way to make your meetings most productive is to attach an objective to them. Writing an agenda will help you:

• Invite all relevant parties

• Everyone come prepared

• Keep the conversation on track

• Ensure every meeting has a goal

• Crystallize the purpose of the meeting

Fio Dossetto, Brand & Marketing Lead at Float, highlights that intentional meetings are especially important when you work remotely with a team across different time zones:

“My number one tip to make a meeting productive is being intentional about it. That means having a clear agenda, ensuring everyone comes to the meeting prepared with things they want to discuss or unblock.”

In Calendly’s survey, a majority of the participants said the lack of an agenda is the true mark of an unproductive meeting.

You don’t need to complicate your agendas or spend hours drafting them. Here’s all the essentials you need to include:

• Meeting title

• Meeting purpose

• Desired outcome

• Docs to review before meeting

• Meeting time (include time zones if you have distributed teams)

• Attendees and their roles (who will lead the meeting, who’s an optional attendee)

• A couple of talking points or context on your agenda

Todoist also has a meeting agenda you can copy and share with your team. Here’s a video guide on how you can use Todoist to create a private meeting agenda:

Dani agrees:

“I think it helps people mentally prepare for the meeting. If they have something they need to discuss or would love to brainstorm with others on a topic, ensure it makes the agenda.”

3. Invite only those who actually need to be there

Ever wondered, “Why am I a part of this meeting” at the halfway point? That’s what happens when you invite the entire team instead of only the relevant people.

Yes, you can simply invite the entire team and mark the invitation as optional, but few people view it that way. A survey by Miro found that 81% of information workers feel pressured to attend optional meetings.

It goes back to the meeting culture. If your team truly understands that declining a meeting where you were the optional attendee means no harm, they’ll be comfortable doing it.

Psychological safety plays a crucial role here: when people trust that they won’t be sidelined or excluded for skipping a meeting, they’ll feel free to decline. And when you have a team that’s protecting their time and focus, everyone wins. 

There’s another side to the coin: Critical attendees are often absent in a meeting, which stalls decisions.

When sending out an invite for a meeting, ensure you know the role each person has to play in it. Maybe they need to know information, share a significant update, or present a new strategy. If you can’t define a clear purpose for someone in the meeting, give them an out.

Additionally, we all know what it’s like to be in a meeting where one person’s holding court and everyone else is blankly staring at the screen. You can avoid this by also communicating the expectations from each attendee in advance, especially for meetings that have lots of attendees.

Do you expect participants to bring questions, solutions, or build on what others say? The more defined a participant's role is in a meeting, the more engaged they tend to be.

Fio suggests that appointing a facilitator can also help with improving engagement in meetings:

“Have a strong facilitator: someone who owns the flow, clarifies who will do what tasks next, and ensures everybody gets time to shine in the spotlight. Without a strong facilitator, there’s also a high risk of meandering and confusion.”

If you are the facilitator (aka someone in charge of leading the meeting), Dani recommends setting the tone right from the beginning:

“I've led meetings where I'm low energy and it absolutely makes the whole thing feel sluggish and not productive. Prep yourself mentally. If you're on a low energy day, take 30 minutes before to clear your head and set your intentions. You want this to be productive for yourself and your teammates, so give yourself space and time to feel ready.”

4. Create a parking lot for tangents

Often, a meeting loses its focus because someone starts or goes on a tangent. It might be a point worth exploring, but it derails the meeting’s direction.

Create a “parking lot” for this situation. The person leading the meeting can intervene and say, “That sounds like a great idea! I’ve parked it to discuss later.” The more specific you can be, the better.

The crucial thing is actually following through on discussing the tangent. It might make your team feel devalued and unappreciated if you don't. Notetakers in a meeting can mark it as “discuss in the future” and you can assign a specific timeline of when, how, and where.

5. Send takeaways and meeting notes

The biggest productivity killer is when you prepare for a meeting, conduct it, but don’t follow through on the action items. Memory’s faulty, after all: You forget what was discussed and exactly who was responsible for which task.

In the book How to Win Meetings, authors Graham Allcott and Hayley Watts, came up with a rule on how much time you should spend before, after, and during a meeting to make it productive. It’s called the 40/20/40 rule:

• Spend 40% of your time preparing for the meeting: setting a clear agenda, gathering & distributing any relevant documents, and sharing invites.

• Spend 20% of your time in the meeting: this is the time to facilitate discussion, follow-through on achieving your objectives, and summarize the meeting.

• Spend 40% of your time following-up post the meeting: ensure the action items get allocated & completed, monitor progress, and help wherever needed.

At the end of a meeting, spend a few minutes verbally summarizing the action points. This allows the attendees to clarify responsibilities immediately rather than waiting for the meeting summary.

You can assign a meeting notetaker for this specific purpose: an attendee who is solely responsible for jotting down what each team member is supposed to do after the meeting ends to achieve the desired outcome. AI meeting assistants can also do a fine job. I personally use tl;dv, but there are plenty of options in the market.

Here are some AI meeting assistants you should check out:

• Fireflies

• Fellow

• Fathom

• Equal Time

In Todoist, assigning responsibilities is even simpler. As soon as the meeting ends, add a new task to your project and assign it to the team member responsible for completing it. You can leave any notes or resources in the description or comment.

How to manage a meeting-bloated calendar

Sometimes, there’s just no way to escape meetings. Maybe you’re managing multiple teams while you hire another leader. Perhaps there’s an important launch due. Hopefully, these situations will last only for a short time. When they arrive, here’s how to prepare for them:

1. Establish a no-meeting day

Theme days have changed my life. I assign one crucial type of task for each day, such as researching on Mondays, writing on Tuesdays, and editing on Wednesdays.

You can adapt them to make your meetings more productive. Establish a no-meeting day: one day of the week when you have no meetings. You can also establish two meeting days and conduct all your meetings on those two days.

Both options are perfectly suitable. Different people and situations will demand different choices. For example, when working on a project requiring quick turnaround times, you can’t conduct all your meetings in two days. It’s more realistic to have one meeting-free day instead.

If you can’t do a full day, try establishing blocks of time instead (no meetings from 9–10 AM, for example). Even an hour of a break from meetings counts!

You can use these blocks to rest, go for a walk, or do some deep work.

2. Audit your recurring meetings

If there’s no end to your meeting-bloated calendar, you need to take stronger steps to free yourself.

Start by conducting a meeting audit of all your recurring meetings. Reclaim’s survey found 52.9% of meetings in a typical calendar are regular meetings.

These types of meetings often appear necessary, but are actually just catch-up calls that can be a simple email instead.

• If a recurring meeting has an end in sight (for instance, it ends after a project gets completed), you can keep it. But question if you can reduce the frequency of meetings. Instead of once a week, can you meet once every other week? Also, don’t be afraid to decline a recurring meeting if there are no new updates.

• If a recurring meeting has no end in sight, consider deleting it and making those meetings one-off instead. You only get on a call when you need to (and have a strong agenda!). If you still feel the need for that meeting after a few weeks, you can add it back in.

The truth is only a few subjects (like a 1:1 with your manager) require meeting regularly. All other topics can be one-off meetings when you actually have something new to share.

What if you and your team member are at a crossroads about whether or not a recurring meeting is necessary? Fio advises digging deep and trying to understand what your colleague is looking for from a regular meeting:

“You want to investigate why you have a different perception of the necessity of the meeting. For example, is your coworker looking for alignment? Or are they looking for visibility? Are they looking for real-time brainstorming? It's important to understand the goal and what they are looking for so you can propose an alternative.”

Dani echoes this sentiment and emphasizes the importance of constructive feedback:

“Constructive feedback is really important. If I don't think a meeting is serving me, it's kind to be direct with the owner. Give clear feedback why you don't think the meeting is working anymore and give a few options to move forward. Maybe you think the meeting could be beneficial if it's 30 minutes instead of an hour. Maybe it would be better to make a thread in Slack with everyone's updates.”

3. Reduce meeting times for each meeting

Calendars default to 30 and 60 minute blocks. But often you don’t need that much time to get to the bottom of a meeting, especially when you have back-to-back calls.

Instead of sticking to 30 minute blocks, cut the time short to 15 minutes instead. If Parkinson’s law is to be believed, you’ll fulfill the meeting agenda in the time you allot for it, whether that’s 15 minutes or half an hour.

Meetings often get a bad reputation for being a timesuck. But when done right, they can be incredibly productive, spark better collaboration, and help you feel more connected with your teammates. The problem isn’t that we conduct meetings. It’s that we sometimes waste the opportunity when we do.