Everyone hates meetings, especially technical people

Another meeting invite shows up, and you instantly feel annoyed.

But let's be honest: it's not meetings we hate.

It's inefficient, unstructured, and purposeless ones.

The kind where no one knows why they're there, and nothing changes after it's done.

That's the real nightmare.

But meetings can be productive.

They help align vision, bring in different perspectives, drive decisions, and showcase work.

Efficient meeting attributes:

✦ Have a clear agenda

If you're organizing the meeting, it's your job to list the discussion points.

If you're invited, ask for the agenda. Don't wait until the call to figure out what it's about.

Encourage participants to read through it in advance so the meeting is about discussion, not discovery.

✦ Keep the participant list short

The more people, the less engagement.

I once joined a "brainstorming" with 10 people, where only 2 spoke.

The rest were passive, waiting to be told what to do. If someone's just there to listen, send them the recording.

✦ Define outcomes and next steps

Every meeting should end with a short summary:

 - What did we agree on?

 - Who's doing what next?

 No actionable output? Then what was the point?

✦ Facilitate the conversation

Stay on track. If the discussion starts drifting, gently call it out:

 "Let's park this for another time."

 Someone needs to guide the meeting, or it will guide itself into a black hole.

I hate useless meetings.

But I love the ones where things get done.