Meetings that earn their place in the week

Productivity · 2026-05-02 · 6 min read

By Nisha Verma, Business & operations

A recurring meeting is a standing charge on everyone’s attention. Very few of them are re-justified after the month they were created.

Meetings accumulate like subscriptions. Each one made sense the week it was created, and none of them is ever cancelled, so a calendar slowly fills with a schedule nobody would design from scratch.

The test is simple: does this meeting produce a decision, resolve a disagreement or build a relationship. If it distributes information, it is a document. If it demonstrates progress, it is a dashboard.

Give every meeting a written pre-read and start with silent reading time. It feels awkward for two sessions and then permanently raises the quality of discussion, because people argue with the actual proposal instead of their recollection of it.

Default to half the duration and half the attendees. Work expands into the hour it is given, and every additional person makes genuine disagreement less likely rather than more informed.

Once a quarter, delete every recurring meeting and let people re-add only the ones they miss. Almost nobody misses most of them, and the ones that come back have earned the slot.

Tags: meetings, focus, teams

Nisha Verma — Nisha covers small-business strategy, productivity and digital marketing for ESPYCRUX. She is interested in the tactics that work without a large team or budget, and skeptical of the ones that only work in a case study.