Stephan Schmidt, CTO Coach - September 1, 2025

Ultimate Guide to Meetings - everything I know about meetings

How to have meetings that are productive, necessary and effective

Table of Contents

1. Meetings
2. Why people do not like meetings
3. Why Everyone has so many meetings
4. What kind of meetings are unnecessary
5. Why schedule meetings at all
6. How bad meetings look like
7. How to make meetings work
8. How to align
9. How to decide
10. How to communicate
11. Insights about meetings

There are good meetings and bad meetings. There are necessary meetings and unnecessary meetings. Drop all unnecessary meetings and make the bad ones good.

Meetings

Everyone hates meetings. Or not enough people hate meetings so we have too many? This Ultimate Practical Guide will explain why we have so many meetings, why meetings are bad, what meetings are not necessary and how to create good meetings.

As a manager, executive or founder, after reading this guide and following its principles, you will be able to know about the right amount of meetings and how to run a more productive and happy organisation.

Why people do not like meetings

To make things better, lets first understand why people do not like meetings.

I looks like the majority of people do not like meetings. Really? If we take a closer look, there are two kinds of people. Those that need to produce things, and those who manage things. As a generalization, those who produce things don’t like meetings, those who manage things do. Paul Graham touches on this in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule :

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work."

But there are many more reasons beside the distruption why people don’t like meetings. The biggest reason, people don’t get something out of it. Th meeting was schedule by it’s owner for their benefit, because they wanted to communicate, or discuss or get an status update. There is nothing in it for attendees, the meeting was not created for them.

When a meeting doesn’t affect attendees, or they at least don’t know how it affects them, they don’t like it. The meeting doesn’t help them, it’s a waste of time for them. Sitting through this overlong meetings, hearing people talk and talk and talk is boring if you can’t connect the dots. With remote work, these meetings became much more draining.

Every maker in a company is on a deadline, with pressure to deliver. The meeting is a distraction from the work they need to do. They do need to other things.

In short

• The meeting is not for attendees and doesn’t affect them
• Only the owner of the meetings benefits from it, no one else
• The meeting doesn’t help attendees do their work
• Sitting in a meeting is boring
• With remote they became more draining
• Makers need to do other things

Why Everyone has so many meetings

One meeting here and there would not be a problem. But for many people their calendar is packed with meetings. It’s a game of Tetris, meetings fitting into a calendar. Instead of an empty calendar, with plenty of space to do things, the calendars are full.

In a tech company I once spend my whole day in meetings, coincidentally in the same meeting room. I didn’t have to move, just the people came and went. It was a surreal experience. Also by coincident, my colleague from product next to me was in the same meetings, the whole day. So we sat side by side and watched the scenery change. This was decades ago and it dawned on me that we have too many meetings.

To get to a better meeting culture, we need to understand why everyone has so many meetings first.

For some people, meetings represent easy work. They genuinely enjoy talking rather than producing tangible results. Think about it - if you don’t actually produce work or make concrete decisions, you can’t really make mistakes. When someone doesn’t know what to do or lacks clear direction, scheduling meetings becomes the default activity they can engage in.

Many people actually love meetings because talking is often easier than thinking hard about complex problems. Meetings provide a comfortable environment where you can participate without being held accountable for specific results. Unlike deliverables or decisions that can be measured and evaluated, meetings themselves don’t have concrete outcomes that people can be held responsible for.

People send indiscriminate invitations to meetings, often inviting far more people than necessary. This frequently stems from not wanting to take responsibility for decisions. By inviting everyone, they can say “You could have said something” if issues arise later.

Many organizations struggle with decision-making, which directly leads to more meetings. When people can’t make decisions effectively, they schedule additional meetings hoping to reach clarity. When decisions are made but not kept or followed through, more meetings are needed to revisit and remake those same decisions. And when there’s no clear decision-making process in place, meetings become the default mechanism for trying to figure things out, even though they’re often ineffective for this purpose.

Many people schedule meetings when they feel they’re losing control over a situation or project. They believe that calling an ad-hoc meeting will somehow help them regain control or influence the outcome, even when the meeting itself won’t actually solve the underlying issues.

Crisis meetings are another common source of meeting overload. And this is fine, if the default mode of the company isn’t crisis mode. But because of poor planning, poor execution, poor skills the company stumbles from one crisis to the next. When something goes wrong, the immediate reaction then is often to gather everyone together to “figure it out,” even though many crisis situations would be better handled by preventing it in the first place.

In short

• Some people just love meetings
• For some, meetings are easy work, they enjoy talking not working
• People don’t want to take responsibility, so they invite everyone, “You’ve could have said something”
• Organisations are bad at decisions so they have the same meetings over and over again
• People feel a lack of control on what is going on, so the schedule ad-hoc meetings to feel in control
• Employees have low skills or a low quality culture, so there are many risis meetings
• Company is missing a communication strategy, so they schedule meetings with the same people over and over again

What kind of meetings are unnecessary

The easiest way to reduce the number of meetings is to remove the unnecessary meetings. The owner of the meeting thinks every meeting they schedule is necessary, otherwise they would not schedule them. Or at least they can’t be bothered to stop them, because it’s convenient to have a meeting that acts as a placeholder for whatever time you want to say something. Drop those placeholder meetings, drop all meetings that are only useful to you.

A large block of meetings are status meetings, as a group or as a meeting between two individuals. They often happen in cultures where many things go wrong, or where people don’t know how to do things or pn what to work - or in general what they are doing. More status give the illusion of control and progress. Drop them - status can always be sent with an email.

As a sidenote, there are three kind of problems for status updates. Problems you can solve and your boss doesn’t need to know. Don’t tell them. Problems that you can solve, and your boss needs to know about, e.g. a security breach, and they might be asked about that problem. Tell your boss. Third, problems that only you boss can solve, e.g. more budget. Ask them to solve it. Structuring status updates with these three problems in mind make them more efficient, less noisy and smaller.

The last block of meetings you can drop are recurring meetings. There are two kinds of useful recurring meetings though. Team meetings for alignment and team building. Everyone working on their code alone is not building a team, but seeing each other and alingin thoughts is.

The second are daily project meetings to push a project and problem forward and speed things up. In the past I’ve successfully implemented daily recruiting meetings when under pressure, with everyone currently recruiting, pushing to read that CV today instead of tomorrow and scheduling the interview tomorrow instead of next week. Stop when the project is done or the problem is solved. Daily synced meetings do speed up compared to asynchronous work. They take their toll though, keep them to an abosulte necessary minimum for the important topics only.

The worst thing you can do, is having weekly recurring project meetings. Then most people will wait for the last day to do work on the project and the project takes forever - with most of the time spent on status updates no one is interested in - except the project manager.

In short

• Meetings that are only for the owner and not useful for the attendees
• Status meetings
• Recurring meetings that lost their purposes

Why schedule meetings at all

There are bad reasons for meetings, status updates and placeholder meetings.

Used the right way, meetings can speed things up tremendously and make the company more successful. A meeting with a discussion and a clear outcome, a meeting for making a decision and then make it will speed things up in your company. Instead of days or weeks of asynchronous ping pong, with some people not participating at all, you schedule one meeting, your done and can move on.

Meetings are great to drive alignment. Talking about your vision, strategy, explaining the why of things is a major tool to align people. It’s not the only tool, and you need to drive alignment in whatever way you can think of, but meetings are a great tool to align people. Offsites and team building work especially well for these purposes.

Meetings can be great for communication. Hearing something in an all hands directly from the CEO is important for communication. The mistake people make with all hands, they stuff the meeting with all the un-important things, like this tech update and that marketing project. Cut all hands to the core and make them relevant and interesting to the audience - with everyone being there, they are costly.

A well executed meeting can speed things up, compared to 1:1 meetings, Slack messages or other asynchronous communication.

In short

• Meetings can speed up discussions
• Meetings can drive decisions
• Alignment work great for alignment
• Important communication can happen in all hands

How to align

Alignment is one of the most important things in company. With alignment everything becomes smoother and faster - less resistance, less friction, less confusion and more momentum. A good reason for a meeting can be to align everyone.

In short

• Alignment starts with giving direction
• Align with discussion
• Align by asking people on what they think and their opinions
• Align through meetings as groups
• Align through 1:1s
• Listen to opposition and contrary arguments

How to decide

Making decsions is a superpower in companies and give you an advantage over your competitors. A good reason for a meeting can be to make a decision.

In short

• Clear decision process which everyone knows and understands
• Clear who makes a decision
• If you have all the information, make a decision and don’t wait
• What would you need to make a decision?
• Do not open decisions again but stick with decisions
  • only revisit decisions if circumstances change substantially

How to communicate

Communication needs to be efficient and impactful. Managers need to overcommunicate to make their points stick in all the noise.

For efficient and impactful communication you need a plan. Ad-hoc communication is not effective or efficient. How do people get all the information they need? How do people who where on holiday or sick get informed? How is your planned information flow from the CEO to the intern?

This way ypu’ll get to the right amount of meetings that are necessary and effective.

How bad meetings look like

Beside too many meetings, meetings are often bad on top. After getting rid of unnecessary meetings, we need to make the bad ones good.

Bad meetings have no agenda. People come unprepared, the meeting is a placeholder to talk. Without an agenda and a moderator, unimportant issues take disproportionate large chunge of the meeting, important things are not disucssed or not enough, and then moved to the next meeting. Without an agenda people can’t prepare, they don’t bring relevant information and the meeting often ends in a collaborative slide reading event - instead of assuming all slides and material has been read and the meeting is for discussing the points and making decisions.

Bad meetings have no decisions. The can is kicked down the road, decisions are postponed because there is always the meeting next week. There is no progress and meetings become a selfullfilling necessity. Without decisions, the same topics are discusses over and over again.

Bad meetings have to many attendees. Everyone who is sitting at the table has an opinion, everyone thinks they are part of the decision making process. More people, bring more irrelevant topics to the table. Smaller teams lead to better meetings - five developers in a room have six opinions, but this often doesn’t make things better, just makes meetings take longer.

A bad meeting has no meeting notes. People who were not there want to discuss the things they missed next time, or at least are not informed. Without meeting notes it’s not clear what has been discussed. Two people leave a meeting nodding in agreement, but take different things away. Meeting notes make it clear what decisions have been made - which meeting notes should focus on. Who was there, what was decided - no status, no talking points. A slides are not meeting notes.

In short

• No agenda, so no one can prepare
• No meeting minutes or bad meeting minutes
• No decisions are made, so the same agenda next week
• Same topics are talked about over and over again
• Too many attendees bring too many opinions and topics

How to make meetings work

In short

• Team sends one represantative to the meeting, not all five developers attend
• Smaller meetings, less opinions
• Clear goal: Alignment, Decision, Discussion
• Meetings can speed up decisions and discussions vs. email/Slack/…
• Don’t: Status updates,
• No agenda: Don’t go there
• Always have meeting minutes: Only document who was there, what was decided. No status, no information.
• Meetings are not for you, but for the attendees.
• Invite only who is really necessary
• Make as short as possible
• Be careful with recurring meetings, they often are filled with topics just because they are there
• 1:1 are essential, but are for the employee not for you
• If necessary, have daily meetings for recruiting, projects , DON’T have weekly meetings, people will start working one day before the meeting
• Make sure no-one is late, it waste lots of money of people waiting
• End meeting early if possible, no need to fill it up just because everyone is there
• Meetings are part of a communication strategy - imagine how information flows from the CEO/CTO/… to everyone who needs to know - and they can’t skip it / Only one part, repeat repeat repeat.
• As a manager, instead of meetings have open office hours e.g. at lunch. Everyone can come and talk to you, often people only need your opinion or a decision, taking 5 minutes - they don’t need to schedule a meeting
• Meetings are not the primary work: Make sure that employees have big block of uninterrupted time to work on their own. Schedule all meetings e.g. past 3pm and have meeting free days.

Core insights about meetings for tech managers

1. Every meeting must have value for everyone attending

Every meeting needs to be structured in a way that there is something in it for everyone. Or else they won’t come. If developers don’t attend meetings, it’s because those meetings only benefit the manager, not the attendees.

2. Context switching from meetings kills developer productivity

Cluster all meetings that are necessary and prevent all other meetings. Developers need long stretches of uninterrupted time, and scattered meetings with 1-hour gaps destroy productivity by causing 9+ minutes of context switching overhead each time.

3. Status meetings are productivity drains

Too many managers insist on push. They want status meetings, they want email status reports. I consistently advocate against status meetings, calling them time wasters that serve manager insecurity rather than actual work needs.

4. Decision meetings can be valuable, but most meetings are not

There are good meetings and bad meetings. I still think the right meetings - about decisions - can speed up things a lot. While status and talk meetings - urgh.

5. Default response to meeting invites should be “no”

The most important thing I did in the was to change the default answer for a meeting invite from being a ‘yes’ to a ’no’. This had a massive boost on productivity. The average time people spent in meetings went down. I advocate for making “no” the default response to protect everyone’s time.

6. Silent meetings can make meetings more effective

Silet meetings are more productive. We assume that meetings are talk, talk, talk, but we’re wrong.

7. Never attend meetings without an agenda

Don’t go to meetings without an agenda. Neither should your reports. Meetings without agendas are a waste of time and should be avoided entirely. If people ask why you didn’t come, say “There was no agenda”.

8. Standup meetings should focus on alignment, not status

I’m a huge fan of daily standups, but I do agree with people that most standups are done wrong. Some ideas to make them better: Focus on alignment, not status. Stand behind everyone, or turn your camera of so people don’t report status updates to you. Facilitate the efficient exchange of necessary information (most isn’t relevant to others!) and drive decisions. Effective standups prevent interruptions later.

9. Meeting-free Wednesdays are an effective productivity boost

I do think it’s a little extreme to cancel all meetings, but introduce meeting free days.

10. Meetings become “accountability sinks” when everyone is invited

Meetings where everyone and the kitchen sink (ha!) was invited to, become accountability sinks.