The (CoS) Dentist Wants You to Practice Meeting Hygiene

I want to talk about meetings.

Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that approximately 90% of the meetings on your calendar are a colossal, inexcusable, entirely preventable waste of everyone's time — including yours, mine, and every talented person in your organization currently sitting in a conference room pretending to take notes while answering emails and waiting for something actionable to happen.

Nothing actionable is going to happen. There's no agenda. The right people aren't in the room. The decision hasn't been properly set up. And in forty-seven minutes someone is going to say "let's take this offline" and schedule another meeting where the exact same thing happens.

This is not a technology problem. Not a culture problem. Not a remote-versus-in-person problem or a Zoom fatigue problem. It is a preparation problem. And it is entirely fixable.

[Preparation] is the difference between a meeting that ends with a clear decision and a clear path forward, and a meeting that ends with someone saying, “Let’s circle back," while everyone quietly updates their mental model of how dysfunctional this organization is.

A Chief of Staff who runs meetings well doesn't show up with an agenda and call it preparation. They've done a round of conversations before the meeting that most people would consider unnecessary — and that, in practice, takes thirty minutes and changes the entire outcome.

They've talked to every person who will be in the room. Not formally — in a "quick five minutes before Thursday" kind of way. Same questions every time: What do you want to get out of this meeting? What are you hoping to achieve? What matters most to you in this conversation? What's motivating your position?

By the time the meeting starts, they know the answer for every person at the table. They know whose concerns need to be addressed early and whose objections will surface regardless. They know where alignment already exists and where the actual disagreement lives — because the actual disagreement is rarely where everyone assumes it is.

This is not mind-reading. It's preparation. And it is the difference between a meeting that ends with a clear decision and a clear path forward, and a meeting that ends with someone saying "let's circle back" while everyone quietly updates their mental model of how dysfunctional this organization is.

Stakeholder pulse checks. A quick one-on-one with each attendee — five to ten minutes, casual, not a pre-meeting meeting. You're listening for the thing they won't say in the room: the concern that feels too political to raise, the objection they've already decided is futile, the perspective no one else knows they have. Surface it now and you can actually address it. Leave it buried and it will derail you mid-meeting or, worse, after the meeting when the decision you thought you made quietly falls apart.

A pre-read that actually pre-reads. Not a dump of background documents. A one-page brief: here's the decision we're making, here are the options, here are the constraints, and here's the recommendation if we have one. When people walk in already oriented, the meeting can spend its time on real deliberation instead of collective catch-up. This is not optional. Sending a pre-read the morning of doesn't count. Send it two days before, assume nothing, and invite questions.

A decision brief for complex calls. For anything consequential — budget decisions, org changes, strategic pivots — a good CoS writes a short decision brief with context, options, pros and cons, recommended path, and what happens if we delay. This does three things. It forces clarity about whether you're actually ready to make this decision. It gives attendees something concrete to react to rather than starting from scratch. And it surfaces disagreements before the meeting, which means the meeting can resolve them instead of just discovering them.

Role clarity before anyone sits down. Who's making the decision? Who's advising? Who's there to implement? Who's there because they need to be informed? These are different jobs, and conflating them creates confusion, politicized input, and decisions made by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. A Chief of Staff clarifies this before the meeting starts — ideally on the agenda, explicitly — so no one wastes time trying to figure out where they stand.

At minimum, a meeting worth having produces four things: a clear decision, a clear assignment of who is executing it, a clear deadline, and clear deliverables. Not vague next steps. Not "we'll revisit." Specific commitments, specific owners, specific dates.

Leave a meeting without these four things and you did not have a meeting. You had a conversation that consumed everyone's time without moving anything forward. These are not the same thing, and treating them as equivalent is one of the most expensive habits in organizational life.

But a Chief of Staff running a meeting is also managing several things simultaneously that most facilitators never think about:

Time. There is nothing more disrespectful than running long on a meeting that wasn't worth the original invite. A CoS tracks time against the agenda in real time and makes the call to cut, table, or compress when necessary. "We have ten minutes left and two decisions to make" is not a rude thing to say. It is a gift.

Voice equity. Not just making sure everyone is heard, but making sure the right people are heard. The loudest person in the room is not always the most relevant. The most senior person is not always the most informed. A good CoS creates space for the person in the corner with the most relevant knowledge and the least political confidence to deploy it uninvited. Often that person has the thing that changes the outcome.

The unspoken. The most consequential things in any meeting are frequently the things nobody says out loud. Tension between two people that's been simmering since Q2. A concern about the CEO's pet project that no one will raise directly. A budget implication that everyone has noticed and no one wants to name. A Chief of Staff watches the room for what isn't being said — and either creates the opening for it to surface or notes it and addresses it afterward.

Decision integrity. Decisions made in a meeting have a way of quietly shape-shifting afterward — "I thought we agreed on X" becoming "I understood that as more of a suggestion." A CoS documents decisions in real time and recaps them before the meeting ends: "To confirm, we're doing X. Sarah owns it. Done by the 15th. Is that right?" This sounds overly formal until you've watched a team spend three weeks relitigating a conversation they thought was settled.

No agenda. The most basic failure and somehow the most common. An agenda is not a list of topics. It is a map of decisions that need to be made, information that needs to be shared, and the sequence in which these things need to happen to produce an outcome. If you can't articulate the decisions your meeting needs to make, you are not ready to have the meeting. Reschedule it.

The wrong people in the room — and this comes in two flavors, both destructive. First, people present who don't need to be there. They can't contribute to the decisions being made. They're there for political reasons or historical courtesy, and their presence slows everything down and signals to everyone else that attendance is more about optics than outcomes. Second, missing the people who actually need to be there — which means any decision made will be relitigated the moment the missing stakeholder surfaces their concerns. And they will. They always do.

Decisions that haven't been set up. You put a decision on the agenda and assume everyone understands the context, the constraints, and the options. They don't, or more likely, they understand them differently. Three different understandings of the problem produce three different proposed solutions, and the meeting spins for an hour without landing anywhere. This is fixable with a pre-read. It is not fixable in real time.

No psychological safety for disagreement. This one's sneaky. The meeting looks fine — everyone's nodding, no one's fighting, a decision gets made. And then nothing happens, because three people disagreed and didn't say so, and now they're not moving. A CoS who has done the pre-work knows who those three people are. They've already surfaced the objection, addressed it, or created space for it to be raised without career consequences. If you can't get honest input in your meetings, you don't have a meeting problem. You have a culture problem, and the meetings are just where it shows up.

The recursive meeting. You know this one. The follow-up to the follow-up to the conversation that didn't produce anything the first time. It happens when meetings end without decisions, without owners, without deadlines; when "let's reconnect on this" is treated as a resolution rather than a failure. A Chief of Staff's job is to make recursive meetings unnecessary by ensuring that the first meeting produces something worth building on.

You probably don't know how much bad meetings are costing you. Not because you haven't tried to calculate it; it's because you've never experienced the alternative, so you have no baseline for what you're missing.

HBR research found executives now spend close to 23 hours a week in meetings, more than double what it was in the 1960s.¹ In a separate HBR survey, 71% of senior managers called meetings unproductive and inefficient, and 65% said those same meetings actively prevent them from doing their own work.² That's not disengaged junior employees venting. That's leadership —the people who scheduled the meetings in the first place(!)— admitting the system is broken. And it's getting worse: Asana's 2024 State of Work Innovation report found that individual contributors' unproductive meeting load has jumped 118% since 2019.³ The problem isn't leveling off. It's compounding.

The alternative looks like meetings where decisions get made, assignments are clear, people leave knowing exactly what happens next. Organizational momentum that's real and visible. Fewer emails, fewer Slacks, fewer "just circling back" messages asking for updates on things that were never actually decided. When you get this right — when your meetings are worth attending, when people leave with clarity instead of questions, when decisions stick because the right people made them with the right information — the whole organization moves differently. Faster and with less friction. With significantly less of the follow-up-to-the-follow-up that fills everyone's calendar with recursive conversations about conversations that didn't produce anything the first time.

Meeting hygiene sounds like a small thing. Office management. Administrative polish.

It is not small. It is one of the highest-leverage operational improvements available to any organization, it costs nothing to implement, and it is almost universally ignored until someone who understands it walks in the door and starts doing it differently.

That person is your Chief of Staff.

The 90% of meetings that are a waste of time are not inevitable. They are a choice — just a choice nobody realized they were making.

¹ Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun, "Stop the Meeting Madness," Harvard Business Review, July–August 2017.

² Ibid.

³ Asana Work Innovation Lab, "State of Work Innovation Report," 2024. asana.com/inside-asana/unproductive-meetings.