5 ways to design better meetings and improve your work calendar

A Meeting Doomsday is a radical way to clear meeting debt.

[Image: fitpinkcat84/Adobe Stock]

BY Next Big Idea Club

Below, Rebecca Hinds shares five key insights from her new book, Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done.

Rebecca is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. Her research is consistently featured in publications like Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Wired.

If you’re tired of watching your organization suffer under the weight of bad, broken, bloated meetings, there are proven ways to replace that slow-motion dumpster fire with calendars that actually move work forward. By treating meetings like a product, you can design the best meetings ever.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Rebecca herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.

1. Treat your meetings like a product.

Meetings are your organization’s most important product. They’re where decisions are made, priorities are set, and culture is built. Yet meetings are the least designed, least tested, and least optimized product in your organization. In the U.S. alone, they burn well over $1.4 trillion a year—more than 5 percent of GDP.

You would never ship a physical product to customers without thoughtful design, testing, iteration, and user feedback. But organizations ship meetings exactly this way every single day.

Meetings need design. If you haven’t done the hard work of designing the meeting, you don’t deserve to hold it. And if meetings are a product, then we should design them using the same principles that make products great.

Claire's went from tween mall icon to bankrupt — twice?

© Fast Company