Comment by wheelinsupial

It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics.

Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these.

1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information distribution, problem solving, decision making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot smoother or even be moved to something like an email and be done with it.

2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the meeting invite.

3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend the time preparing for a meeting.)

4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action items and who will do them (preferably with an initial estimate). Review these action items and people responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.

5. Send out the notes and action items.

Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+ people, we'd probably see better meetings.