Meeting agenda

How to use it well

• →Write the goal as "we are done when…" — if you can't finish that sentence with a decision or an artifact, the meeting is a status update and could be a message instead.
• →A topic without an owner and a time box expands to fill the meeting; the numbers force the trade-off conversation before the room does.
• →The "not today" line is the cheapest facilitation trick there is — scope creep dies faster when the parking lot is printed on the agenda.

Part by part

Goal — we are done when: {{goal}}

A completion condition rather than a subject. It is the difference between a meeting that can end and one that runs to its scheduled length.

Before the meeting, please read/do:

Pre-work stated as a requirement. Reading a document together in the room is the most expensive possible use of the time.

Not today (parked on purpose)

Names what is deliberately excluded, which is what stops the meeting drifting into the adjacent topic everyone would rather discuss.

shared the same day

A commitment about the output. Decisions circulated a week later have already been acted on or forgotten.

Common mistakes

• An agenda that is a list of topics.

  Topics have no completion condition, so the meeting ends when time runs out rather than when it is finished. Stating what done looks like changes how the conversation is run.

• Sending the pre-read with the invite an hour before.

  Nobody reads it, so the first fifteen minutes are spent reading in silence or, worse, pretending. Pre-work needs enough notice to actually be done.

• No parked section.

  The adjacent interesting topic will come up, and without somewhere to put it the meeting either follows it or someone has to refuse it in the room. A written parking space does that job impersonally.

Questions