Productivity Hacks: No Agenda, No Meeting—No Exceptions

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share their secrets to being more productive. See all their #productivityhacks here.

At start-ups, ineffective meetings are the biggest drag on productivity. Not only are ineffective meetings a drain on the team’s patience, but also they can have serious implications for your business. Every minute that is spent in an ineffective meeting is a minute not spent on building your product or innovating to delight your customers. Moreover, ineffective meetings almost always result in an absence of meaningful outcomes.

To hack meetings, make an agenda a requirement before time can be scheduled.
The new rule is: No agenda, no meeting. No exceptions.

Some will complain, "But planning an agenda takes time, and I already have so many things on my plate!” I agree. Planning an agenda is a barrier to planning a meeting. But its an extremely useful barrier. It forces people to think about how the time is going to be used and if there are other ways of completing the objective without having to meet. It may seem obvious, but reducing the number of unneeded meetings and increasing the effectiveness of essential meetings will result in materially more successful outputs in your business.

I've learned a lot about what not to do from my many past experiences of participating in unproductive meetings. So in my current role at Greylock, I hold a weekly staff meeting for the sole purpose of keeping the team informed and reinforcing our priorities. We use Quip as a light way way of tracking the meeting topics and follow-up actions. Our agenda, which is always circulated in advance, typically looks like this:

• Biggest win from last week — remind people that their work matters. (See TED Talk by Dan Ariely on what makes us feel good about work.)
• Important updates — keep the team connected to current information.
• Priorities — reinforce what is important.
• Tensions — borrowed from Holacracy to make sure there is nothing preventing people from getting things done.
• Actions — people take ownership over any follow-up items.

With this agenda, we have been able to keep the team focused, on track and engaged through the entire meeting. And we have eliminated a great deal of the 'meeting fatigue' that was holding us back.

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