# Meet the Meeting Villains

Source: https://lessmeeting.com/meeting-villains/

Meet the five Meeting Villains: the Meeting Hog, the Meet-Head, the Hold-Up, the Meeting Hijacker and Miss Agenda-Less. Here's how to stop each one.

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The Meeting Villains are five recurring characters behind most bad meetings. Each one is paired with the Less Meeting feature that stops it.

## The Meeting Hog

*Won't give up the floor.* Always talking, whether they have a point or not, whether it's the right time or not.

**Fix:** Per-topic time limits, so everyone (the hog included) knows exactly what's on the table and how long they've got. [Read more](/blog/managing-the-meeting-hog/).

## The Meet-Head

*Meets about meetings.* Schedules a meeting to talk about the next meeting; every status update becomes another block on the calendar.

**Fix:** Automatic meeting scores and cost analytics expose the meetings that should've been an email, a call, or a DM. [Read more](/blog/meeting-villains-meet-head/).

## The Hold-Up

*Keeps the whole room waiting.* Every meeting is ready to start, and everyone's waiting on one person.

**Fix:** The timed agenda starts its countdown when the meeting does, so the first topic is wrapped by the time the Hold-Up walks in. Next week, they're early.

## The Meeting Hijacker

*Steers onto their own topic.* Shows up, veers onto a pet topic, and burns the whole slot.

**Fix:** A parking lot catches off-topic tangents and saves them for later, so the agenda you set is the agenda you run. [Read more](/blog/meeting-villains-how-to-tell-if-someone-is-a-hijacker/).

## Miss Agenda-Less

*Books meetings with no plan.* Nobody's sure what the meeting is even about; it wanders and ends with nothing decided.

**Fix:** Put the agenda in the invite, straight from an agenda template, so the purpose and everyone's prep are set before anyone walks in.

## The bigger point

Structure beats personality. You can't fix a personality, but you can add structure that takes away the room these villains need to operate. In Less Meeting that means timed agendas and a parking lot for tangents during the meeting, and automatic scoring afterwards to flag the meetings that shouldn't exist.

There's also a sixth villain, [The Meeting Parrot](/blog/meeting-villains-the-meeting-parrot/), who repeats everything everyone else already said.