How to avoid the feeling of "this meeting could have been an email" pt2

There is a particular kind of meeting fatigue that has nothing to do with the number of meetings on your calendar. It comes from attending meetings that go through the motions — the same agenda, the same contributions, the same outcome of very little — and realising somewhere around the forty-minute mark that you could have sent an email.

Earlier this year, I took on a more hands-on role in four recurring meetings: senior leadership, Commercial, Finance, and a general management catch-up. Not just attending, but shaping them — owning the agenda, pulling together the pre-read material, and taking responsibility for what came out the other side. What became clear, fairly quickly, is that the difference between a meeting that earns its place in the calendar and one that doesn't almost never comes down to the people in the room. It comes down to the preparation that surrounds it.

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Four things changed the way these meetings felt, and I think they're worth setting out plainly.

Know what the meeting is actually for. This sounds obvious until you sit with it. Before sending anything to attendees, it's worth being able to answer three questions without hesitation: what is this meeting for, who is it for, and what does a good outcome look like? The answers don't need to be elaborate — in fact, the more concise the better — but if you can't articulate them clearly, the meeting probably can't either. Once you have them, send a brief positioning note to attendees before the session. This is especially useful for recurring meetings, where the original purpose has a way of drifting quietly into habit.

Build the agenda from what's actually happening. The temptation with recurring meetings is to carry the same structure forward indefinitely. Actions from last meeting. Finance update. General business. It's efficient in the short term and deadening in the long one. The agendas that generate the most engaged discussion are the ones that reflect what people are actually thinking about — the concerns that surface in passing conversations, the questions that land in your principal's inbox, the tension that's been sitting just below the surface of several recent exchanges. When the agenda speaks to what's genuinely on people's minds, the room shifts. People stop waiting to be released and start contributing.

Send a pre-read and mean it. A pre-read isn't a formality. When it's used properly — shared with enough time for people to actually read it, and structured so that the meeting can build on it rather than repeat it — it changes the quality of the conversation entirely. In one of the meetings I manage, we restructured the format around this principle. The first thirty minutes are now given over to a specific topic that benefits from open discussion; the remaining time is built around questions arising from the pre-read rather than a presentation of it. Slides exist for context, not as a script. The conversations that have come out of this format are sharper, more honest, and considerably more useful than anything that came before.

Stop the slide readout. If there is one habit that undermines meeting quality more reliably than any other, it is the presenter who reads from their slides word for word. It is slow, it is awkward, and it signals to everyone in the room that the presenter hasn't fully internalised what they're presenting. Setting an expectation that slides are reference material — that presenters should know their content well enough to speak to it naturally — is a small change that makes meetings feel immediately more like conversations. As a secondary benefit, the slides themselves tend to improve: when you can't rely on the deck to carry the room, you build decks that actually communicate something.

None of this requires a major restructure or a difficult conversation. Most of it is simply a matter of being more deliberate about something that has been allowed to run on autopilot. The meetings that feel worth attending are almost always the ones where someone, before the invitation was even sent, asked themselves whether it needed to happen — and if so, what would make it genuinely worth the time of everyone in the room.

That question is usually ours to ask.