Essays

On Meetings (drafting)

Sean Horgan

General principles

Many meetings are a waste of time. Don’t waste people’s time.

Meetings that are worth your time need an objective with a clear agenda to hit that objective. Skip meetings that don’t.

Understand what type of meeting you need and plan accordingly.

Good Meetings

Top 3

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The Secret of the Weekplan⁠

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I’ve found it very useful to bookend each week with a lightweight process that I call Top 3. The goal is to list out the top 3 things I plan to accomplish that week. This isn’t an exhaustive list of all the tasks — it’s a forcing function of focus.

Types of Meetings

The type of meeting you are in will dictate how you manage it.

Decision making

Questions to pose

The What & Why: Is everyone aligned on the problem?

The How: Is everyone aligned on the solution?

The When: Is everyone aligned on the timeline?

The Who: Is everyone aligned the people who owns driving the solution and who is going to tell us we’re done?

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https://hbr.org/1967/01/the-effective-decision⁠

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Retrospective

Problem-solving

1:1

Reduce 1:1 frequency to reflect the product decision frequency. Don’t default to weekly 1:1s unless live decisions are really needed every week.

Anti Meetings

Status updates: 90% of the time these types of meetings should be done asynchronously. The 10% is for customer-facing updates which are really a forum for feedback.