What can replace a meeting?

I believe the core problem with meetings is that we have too many of them. If this is true and we need less, how do we do that?

My guess is that most of these too many meetings are prompted by something reasonable. But due to lack of consideration, and preparedness, and training, meetings end up being a waste of time.

Here are some of the questions I think we should ask if we’re about to schedule a meeting:

1. Why are we meeting? If you can’t answer this, don’t make a bunch of other people guess.
2. Why is each person being invited. Again, if you can’t answer this, don’t invite them.
3. How is the meeting going to go? What am I going to say first? Who talks next? Am I talking the entire time? This is an agenda. Get one or don’t have a meeting.
4. Where are we going to meet? Try to schedule this ahead of time and kick out whoever is in the room when you get there.
5. Can I handle this by making a decision myself?
6. Does this decision have to be made right now?
7. Do all these people need to be a part of this? (This might whittle it down to two people who can meet during a scheduled 1–1 or ad hoc in the process of actually doing work).
8. Is this meeting happening simply because I haven’t prepared well enough and need to think through something more carefully.
9. Do more people need to know about something than can fit in the meeting? If so, prepare that form of communication (paper, deck, email) then decide if you need to also meet to explain it.
10. Could this be handled asynchronously. Basecamp is probably the best at this. Email is a distant second place as a generic tool. Many specialized execution tools are good for this (Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Invision).

There. That’s a good start. Ask those ten things and I’m guessing your meetings will go a lot better and not be a waste of time. (“wasted minutes”, get it?)