For the "I have way too many meetings..." people
Why cutting your calendar won't fix what's actually broken.
TLDR: Founders cut meetings. Nothing changes. That’s because the meeting was never the problem; it was covering for missing decision ownership, unclear roles, and a founder who has to be in every room for anything to move. This one is about what’s actually broken and how to fix it.
I have walked into a lotttt of team meetings.
More than I can count at this point. Across industries, company sizes, funding stages. I am going to tell you something that took me a while to say out loud, because it sounds a little harsh.
Most of them should not have happened.
I don’t say that because I believe meetings are bad. They are not. A well-run meeting is one of the most powerful tools a team has. Truly.
The problem is that what I walk into most of the time is just a weekly obligation. People go around the room, share what they worked on, nod at each other, maybe stress a little, maybe laugh a little, and then leave with exactly the same blockers they walked in with.
Nobody talked about the real stuff. Nobody decided anything.
Fifty-four percent of workers leave meetings with no idea what to do next or who owns the tasks. (Atlassian surveyed 5,000 people across four continents to get that number. So it is not just your team.)
The meeting is not the disease. It is the symptom.
When a founder tells me they have too many meetings, I do not disagree. They probably do.
What I want to ask is: why are those meetings happening in the first place?
Nine times out of ten, the answer is that nobody knows who is allowed to decide anything without the founder in the room. So everyone gets invited to everything, just in case. Updates get shared instead of decisions getting made. The meeting becomes the only place where alignment theoretically lives, so it has to happen every week, forever, whether there is anything to align on or not.
Cut the meetings all you want. The dysfunction lives in the org chart, not the calendar.
What I actually do when I walk in
The first thing I change is not the meeting cadence. It is the agenda.
A real agenda goes out before the meeting. Not the morning of. Not five minutes before. At least the day before. And it is not a list of topics. It is a list of decisions that need to be made and questions that need answers. If nothing is on that agenda by a certain point, the meeting gets postponed. (I know. I know. That sounds extreme. It is also how you get your Tuesday afternoons back.)
People can add to the agenda if something comes up. That is the point. The agenda is a living signal of whether this meeting needs to happen at all.
What I am NOT doing is letting the meeting turn into a status report. Status lives in your project management tool, your Notion, your Slack update. (Hint: Check your documentation system if you are seeing meetings turn into only status updates. )
The meeting is for blockers. Real ones. The ones where someone needs another human in the room to help them move forward. And for decisions. The ones where someone needs to say yes or no, and the team needs to hear it.
That is it. That is the whole job of a meeting.
What well-run actually looks like
Agenda sent 24 hours ahead. Decisions listed, not topics.
Everyone who is on the invite knows why they are there and what they are expected to contribute or decide. If someone is just there to listen, they probably do not need to be there.
The meeting starts on time. (I realize this sounds obvious. It is apparently not.)
Blockers get named and owned. Not vented about. Owned. Someone leaves with the action and a date.
If something comes up that is not on the agenda and is going to take more than five minutes to address, it gets a separate meeting. Not a sidebar. A real slot on the calendar with the right people in it.
And after? A short recap goes out. Decisions made, owners named, next steps with dates. Three to five lines. Not a novel.
That is cross-functional communication working. It does not require more meetings. It does require better ones.
The data, since I know some of you want the receipts
Atlassian’s research found that meetings are ineffective 72% of the time. Three in four could have been a memo.
A separate study found that organizational misalignment is the primary cause of 47% of project failures. Not tools. Not technology. Misalignment.
Those two numbers live together. Meetings that do not produce decisions produce misalignment. Misalignment produces failure. The math is not complicated.
What IS complicated is getting a team to actually change how they meet. Meetings feel productive. Everyone is there. Everyone is talking. Something is happening.
Except nothing is being decided. Nobody owns anything. The founder has to follow up on the same five things they followed up on last week.
Sound familiar?
The fix, since we are here
Keep it simple.
First: a real agenda template your team actually uses. Not a suggestion. A system. Agenda goes out by this day, at this time, with this structure. If it is not filled, the meeting does not happen.
Second: a decision log. Somewhere simple. Could be a Notion page, could be a section in your meeting notes. Every decision that gets made gets written down with a name and a date. Humans are busy and memories are unreliable and clarity is a gift.
That is it. Start there.
The meetings that need to happen will keep happening. The ones that were just filling calendar space will disappear. Your team will start to feel the difference between a meeting that mattered and one that did not.
That feeling is the goal.
If your meetings are the place where things go to stay stuck, that is something I can help with. I work with a small number of founders in an advisory capacity each month, which includes getting this exact infrastructure in place, without a big complicated engagement. If that sounds like what you need right now, hit reply.
KB | Systems & Side Eyes
I need to start using this for my meeting! My week is filled with meetings where 80% of the time we’re bringing everyone up to speed and 20% making decisions. I need to flip that!