How to reduce meetings (and make the ones you keep worthwhile)

Step 1: audit your calendar (30 minutes)

Open your calendar for the last two weeks and list every meeting. For each one, answer honestly:

• What is it for: deciding, solving a problem, aligning or informing?
• Did a concrete decision or task come out of it?
• Did it need you? Would anything have gone wrong if you’d skipped it?
• If it recurs, does it still have the purpose it was created for?

Step 2: decide what to do with each one

With the list in front of you, each meeting falls into one of four groups:

• Drop: it only shares information and nobody decides anything. Replace it with a written update or summary.
• Go async: status updates, document reviews, questions with a clear answer.
• Shorten or space out: the weekly hour that could be a fortnightly 30 minutes.
• Keep and improve: meetings for deciding, resolving conflict or building relationships. Those get an agenda and minutes.

What works asynchronously

Async doesn’t mean “on Slack with no structure”. It means everyone contributes when they can, with a clear deadline and format. It works well for:

• Status updates: everyone writes three lines (done, next, blocked) by 10am Monday.
• Document reviews: comments in the document with a deadline, and a meeting only if people disagree.
• Simple decisions: a written proposal with options and “if nobody objects by Thursday, we go with A”.
• Informational presentations: a short video or doc people watch or read when it suits them.

Rules for the meetings you keep

For a meeting to earn its slot in the calendar:

• A one-line goal in the invite: “Choose the logistics provider”.
• Only the people that goal needs; everyone else gets the minutes.
• Default to 25 or 50 minutes to leave breathing room between meetings.
• End by reviewing agreements: what, who and by when.
• Minutes with tasks reach everyone the same day. No minutes, no meeting.

Protect meeting-free time

Beyond cutting, block out meeting-free time: one morning a week for the whole team, or two afternoons. It works better as a team agreement than as an individual effort, because then nobody books over it. Review it after a month and adjust. Meeting-free time also gives people room for the deep work that a fragmented calendar makes impossible, which is usually the point of the whole exercise.

How to propose it to your team

Cutting your own meetings is easy; cutting a team’s takes agreement. Frame it as a one-month experiment rather than a new rule, and use data from your own calendars:

• Share the team’s list of recurring meetings and ask everyone to mark the ones they could live without.
• Choose two or three together to drop or move to async, and agree what replaces each one.
• During the month, every meeting you keep ends with minutes and tasks.
• At the end, review what people actually missed. Whatever nobody missed stays gone.
• If a dropped meeting turns out to be needed, bring it back shorter and with a clear goal, rather than as it was.

How Tessa helps

Lots of meetings survive out of fear of missing something. Tessa removes that fear: she takes notes in Google Meet (Zoom and Teams in beta), writes the minutes, creates each owner’s tasks and sends the summary. Anyone who skipped it can read it or ask Tessa in Slack what was decided, and minutes show up in search with their sources.

Afterwards, Tessa follows up on commitments and flags anything stuck, which is what makes the follow-up meeting unnecessary. Anything leaving the company, such as a recap to a client, waits for your approval.