Krishna Dey Essay
Meeting hygiene for fast moving teams
Calendars are an operating-system signal. Kill meetings that survive on habit; replace the ones that were covering for a missing written system.
Meeting reduction is not a strategy.
Some teams swing from calendar overload to performative minimalism and call both productivity. Fast-moving teams need meeting hygiene, not meeting absolutism.
A recurring meeting should earn another quarter. Most survive on habit.
Calendars show where the system is weak
If a team’s calendar is bloated, the problem is rarely “too many meetings” as a personality trait. It is often poor information flow, weak decision design, or a ritual nobody has re-examined.
Each recurring meeting should answer:
- What unique purpose does this serve?
- What would break if it disappeared for two weeks?
- What decision or commitment comes out of it?
- What should have been written instead?
If the answer to the second question is “nothing,” kill it. If the answer is “we would lose the only place state is visible,” that is not a meeting problem. That is a missing system, and the call is covering for it.
I have seen this on integration work: sprint calls absorbing an implementation team in status. Pulling them out and moving planning onto velocity and written work made the meeting smaller and delivery more predictable. That is the bar.
Give the meeting a job
Useful meetings have a narrow job and a clear output. They match the actual dependency structure, not a template from last year’s org.
Many recurring meetings improve by:
- moving status into artifacts people already have to maintain
- shrinking the attendee list to people tied to the outcome
- adding written prep so the first twenty minutes are not a recap
- killing the slot when the environment changes
Every surviving meeting should produce a decision, a commitment, a reduction in ambiguity, or alignment that could not have been cheaper.
Legal Intake needed inspectable planning. The meeting was not the plan. Specs, milestones, and named owners were. Meetings then had something to argue about besides folklore.
Hygiene is coordination, not austerity
A lighter calendar matters. The real point is better coordination. Meeting hygiene reduces noise without reducing clarity.
As AI drafts more implementation, the scarce meeting may become spec and review design. That still has to earn its place. A daily “AI standup” that recites tool usage is metric theater with a calendar invite.
If a meeting cannot name its output, it is not a collaboration ritual. It is inventory.