5 ways to design better meetings and improve your work calendar

"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."

Meetings represent organizations' most critical yet least designed product, where decisions are made, priorities are established, and culture develops. Despite their importance, meetings receive minimal design attention, testing, or optimization compared to physical products. In the United States, ineffective meetings cost over $1.4 trillion annually, exceeding 5 percent of GDP. Organizations routinely launch meetings without thoughtful design, user feedback, or iterative improvement—approaches unthinkable for physical products. By applying product design principles to meetings, organizations can eliminate inefficiency and create calendars that genuinely advance work. Designing effective meetings requires deliberate effort; organizations lacking this commitment should reconsider holding meetings at all.

Read at Fast Company