How to avoid wasting someone else’s (and your) time with a better meeting invite

Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash

I’ll (try hard) to continue my 10min-once-a-day post. It’s about meeting invite now. I’ve received quite a lot of meeting invites that didn’t have agenda, only a short title, like “Payment-{Product Name}”. I always reply with “What’s the agenda?” Some replied with a high-level agenda, some never replied. With no clear agenda, from my experience: 1. People were not prepared, 2. Being unprepared, people just brought unrelated topic to the table, 3. People walked out of the room thinking “What did we talk about? I could have done something else.”

So what do I expect?

1. A clear end-goal. Start from the end. What do you expect to have when the meeting is over?
2. When you have a clear end-goal, now you can break it down into milestones, e.g 5min intro of the problems, 10min step through the flow, 5min listing down problems, 7min ideation, 3min wrap up, and so on. This is also helpful to avoid setting up 1–2 hours meeting that actually can be (and should be) done in max. 30min. If it’s more than 30min, maybe it should be a workshop.
3. When you have clear milestones, it’s easy to see who should be and shouldn’t be in the invite. Some like to invite everyone’s sisters and brothers to the meeting. The more the merrier, but in many cases it’s difficult to make a decision when there are more than 4–5 people in the room. It’s not a show, so you don’t need audience to clap for you. You need to decide and move quick.
4. With a clear invitees list, you save others’s time, so more things can be done, and you won’t have people who avoid your invite in the future because you have the reputation of wasting someone else’s time.
5. Attach some links/docs so people can be prepared.

That’s all. So you know how to send a better meeting invite. (That’s my 10min + 6min).