Design High-Impact Meetings: Only Meet When It Matters

High impact meetings and meeting productivity: how to design effective meetings that only happen when they truly matter. A complete, practical guide to meeting design, reducing unnecessary meetings, and solving meeting overload with smarter communication choices. Learn exactly when to meet, when to go async, and how to run shorter meetings that improve decision making, focus, and engagement.

What You'll Learn:

• Use the four core purposes of meetings—Inform, Decide, Create, and Connect—to quickly determine whether you need a live meeting or another communication mode.
• Apply a simple decision tree to choose between asynchronous communication vs meetings so you can reduce unnecessary meetings without losing alignment.
• Redesign recurring calendar events by clarifying purpose, desired outcome, and success metrics to eliminate time-wasting sessions.
• Turn decision making meetings into high impact meetings by pre-loading context, tightening the agenda, and defining clear decision owners.
• Use shorter meetings strategies—like 15-minute decision blocks and structured check-ins—to cut meeting length while increasing effectiveness.
• Audit your team’s meeting portfolio to identify which sessions can be removed, merged, made optional, or moved to async updates.
• Spot the early warning signs of meeting overload and implement lightweight norms that protect deep work time across your team.
• Translate this episode into action by choosing one area where meeting design matters most right now and committing to one small experiment this week.