Meetings: schedule, purpose, and the agenda that earns the time

Meetings are a tool, not a default. A meeting is worth holding when a real decision needs to be made together, in real time, by people who can talk back to each other.

A useful meeting has four pieces in writing before it starts: a purpose (the decision or work product), an agenda with time-boxed items, a list of who needs to be there (and why), and a single notetaker. If any of the four is missing, the meeting will run long and end without a result.

Cadence matters more than length. For most community projects, a 30-minute weekly check-in plus a 60-minute biweekly working session covers it. Daily standups are usually overkill outside of crisis weeks. Anything longer than 90 minutes is two meetings; do not let people pretend otherwise.

Meeting hygiene that pays off: send the agenda 24 hours in advance, take notes in a shared doc the whole team can see during the meeting, end every meeting with a "what is each person doing this week" round, and email a recap within 4 hours. The recap is the artifact; the meeting is the conversation that produced it.

A meeting that could have been an email should be an email. A meeting that requires the team to negotiate or build something together cannot be an email. Your job is to know which is which and to be willing to cancel a recurring meeting whose purpose has dissolved.