The Declaration of Meeting Independence

We wrote this for the Fourth of July: a declaration of independence from meetings that start late, wander, and end with nobody knowing what happens next. The grievances have aged well, which is either funny or depressing depending on how your week is going.

The declaration, in plain text

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the current state of bad meetings, which have created stress, poor morale, and countless wasted hours for decades, there comes a time to separate ourselves from the atrocities of poor meeting culture.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that workers shall have the freedom to deny representation at unwanted meetings, that agendas shall be distributed with meeting invitations, and that clear objectives will be set forth to accomplish meeting tasks.

To secure these rights, we shall use chat for the quick questions that never needed a meeting. We shall assign note takers to document key discussion points, and send minutes to those unable to attend.

It is the right of the people to alter or abolish meetings that are poorly run through negligence or tardiness.

Let facts be submitted to a candid world:

• Bad meetings are driven by scheduling rather than by actual content with clear objectives.
• Bad meetings have dissolved the very agendas that keep meetings on topic and on time.
• Leadership has denied the people the right to give constructive feedback on the meetings they sit through daily.
• Notes are shared days after the meeting, by which point nobody reads them and important updates die quietly.

We, therefore, the representatives of Less Meeting, appeal to the decision makers of these companies to declare that bad meetings shall be abolished and new meeting processes put in place.

What each clause looks like on a Tuesday

A poster is easy to agree with and easy to ignore. Here is the working version of each grievance.

The freedom to decline. Someone has to make it socially safe to ask “what do you need from me here?” before accepting. That usually starts with one manager declining an invitation out loud and surviving it.

An agenda with every invitation. Make this a habit rather than a policy nobody enforces: no agenda, no meeting. The fastest way to get there is to stop writing agendas from scratch. Pick the closest meeting agenda template, put minutes against each topic, and paste it into the invite. Our seven steps to a perfect meeting agenda covers what belongs in one.

A clear objective. One sentence naming the decision the meeting exists to make. If nobody can write that sentence, the meeting is a status update and belongs in a message.

Chat instead of the meeting that didn’t need to happen. In 2013 we named Olark and Google Talk. Today it’s Slack or Teams, and the point is unchanged: the five-minute question doesn’t deserve a thirty-minute block on six calendars.

A note taker, and minutes that go out same day. Days-old minutes are read by nobody. Assign the role at the start, capture decisions and owners as you go, and send before people leave the room. A minutes template makes that a two-minute job instead of an evening one.

The right to give feedback on meetings. People will tell you a recurring meeting is useless if you give them a way to say so that isn’t a confrontation with the organizer. Anonymous ratings on the meeting itself work; a suggestion box does not.

The clause we’d add now

Nothing in the original declaration says what happens to the action items after everyone leaves. That turned out to be where most meetings actually fail. The decision gets made, the owner gets named, and then nothing carries into next week’s occurrence of the same meeting. Across the meetings run on Less Meeting, 84.5% of assigned action items get closed, and the mechanism is unglamorous: the open ones show up again in front of the same people at the next meeting until they’re done. If you’re only going to adopt one habit from this list, follow up on the action items.

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