I want to talk about meetings.

Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that approximately 90% of the meetings on your calendar are a colossal, inexcusable, entirely preventable waste of everyone's time — including yours, mine, and every talented person in your organization currently sitting in a conference room pretending to take notes while answering emails and waiting for something actionable to happen.

Nothing actionable is going to happen. There's no agenda. The right people aren't in the room. The decision hasn't been properly set up. And in forty-seven minutes someone is going to say "let's take this offline" and schedule another meeting where the exact same thing happens.

This is not a technology problem. Not a culture problem. Not a remote-versus-in-person problem or a Zoom fatigue problem. It is a preparation problem. And it is entirely fixable.

A Chief of Staff who runs meetings well doesn't show up with an agenda and call it preparation. They've done a round of conversations before the meeting that most people would consider unnecessary — and that, in practice, takes thirty minutes and changes the entire outcome.

They've talked to every person who will be in the room. Not formally — in a "quick five minutes before Thursday" kind of way. Same questions every time: What do you want to get out of this meeting? What are you hoping to achieve? What matters most to you in this conversation? What's motivating your position?

By the time the meeting starts, they know the answer for every person at the table. They know whose concerns need to be addressed early and whose objections will surface regardless. They know where alignment already exists and where the actual disagreement lives — because the actual disagreement is rarely where everyone assumes it is.

This is not mind-reading. It's preparation. And it is the difference between a meeting that ends with a clear decision and a clear path forward, and a meeting that ends with someone saying "let's circle back" while everyone quietly updates their mental model of how dysfunctional this organization is.