Last January, our leadership team sat in a conference room for the fourth consecutive hour of back-to-back syncs. Nothing was getting decided. People were reading emails under the table. I walked out and told our COO we needed to try something different — not another productivity framework, just shorter meetings with a written brief sent in advance.
What We Changed
Every recurring meeting was cut to twenty-five minutes. The organizer writes a one-page document — context, options, recommendation — and distributes it twenty-four hours before the meeting. Attendees read it beforehand. The meeting itself is only for questions and the final decision. No slide decks, no status updates, no "let me share my screen."
The document became the meeting. The meeting became the decision.
By April, we had eliminated nearly forty percent of our recurring calendar blocks. Engineers reported getting two additional focus hours per day. The quality of decisions improved because people arrived prepared instead of processing information in real time.