When every meeting looks the same
by Daniel
My calendar is full of meetings and for various reasons, I find it difficult to skip them. Some of those meetings help me build context (or keep it up to date) around an area that I care about. Others are there to build and maintain relationships. As a remote worker, I no longer have a space to talk to peers on the way to lunch or while grabbing coffee, so 1:1s fill that purpose too.
With the amount of meetings in my calendar, I don’t have clarity about which meetings actually need my real-time presence. This is particularly troublesome when there are conflicts and I need to pick 1 of 2 (or sometimes 3) meetings to attend.
I need a system to decide: Is this important? Do I need to be there in real time? Can I just read the notes afterward?
Every meeting invite looks the same in my calendar. A 30-minute block with a vague title and a list of attendees. No indication of whether I’m there to make decisions, provide context, or just stay informed. This forces me to make attendance decisions with incomplete information. I end up in meetings where I contribute nothing, while missing others where my input was actually needed.
I’ve been thinking about this for a few months now and finally wrote down some notes on what I would like to see in every calendar entry. I came up with a template and the first iteration is this:
# Daniel's Experimental Meeting Template
## Meeting Notes
*Specify the location of the meeting notes. It may be an attached document, a wiki page, a tab in a document or a shared folder.*
## Attendees
*Who will find value from attending this meeting? It could be a project manager, designer, stakeholders for a project, your team or engineers working on a specific platform.*
## Pre-work
*What should attendees prepare before the meeting? Should they come with a list of questions? Or read a document?*
## Type of Meeting
*What is the primary purpose for this meeting? This helps set expectations for participants.*
- [ ] Fact-finding - Gathering information, understanding current state, identifying unknowns
- [ ] Decision-making - Making choices with clear authority and accountability
- [ ] Consensus-building - Aligning on approach through discussion and agreement
- [ ] Context sharing - Providing updates, knowledge transfer, or background information
- [ ] Status update - Reporting progress, blockers, and next steps
- [ ] Dry run - Practice or preparation for upcoming meeting or presentation
- [ ] 1:1 - One-on-one discussion (career development, feedback, relationship building)
- [ ] Other: ________________
## Agenda
*Create a time-boxed agenda to keep the meeting focused. If the meeting is at risk of going over the allotted time, schedule a separate meeting or resolve the remaining issues offline.*
Example:
- 2-5 minutes: Review action items from the previous meeting
- 5-15 minutes: Discussion on [main topic]
- 5 minutes: Pulse check on [specific area - project health, blockers, team sentiment]
## Purpose
*Write one to three sentences describing what this meeting is intended to accomplish. Include what is NOT in scope to prevent scope creep.*
Example: The meeting is intended to discuss the development status and challenges of [project]. This is not a meeting to explore or make decisions on other projects.
## Exit Criteria
*When should this recurring meeting end or evolve?*
Example: This meeting will stop once Project ABC is either shipped or rolled back.
## Related Meetings
*List other meetings where this topic might come up. This may be a platform sync, team meeting, or org-wide meeting.*