The meeting template

Every meeting I run starts as a copy of the same plain-text block. It lives in a snippet on my laptop and takes four seconds to paste. I used to think a template would make meetings feel stiff. What happened instead is that I stopped forgetting to write down who owns what.

Meeting:
Date:
Who:
Decision needed:
Notes:
Decisions:
Open questions (owner, date):
Next meeting / none:

“Decision needed” is the line I added after a week of back-to-back syncs in which nobody could say, afterwards, what the meeting was for. If I cannot fill that line before the meeting, I cancel it. This has cancelled roughly one in five of my own invites, which says something unflattering about my invites.

Open questions

Each open question gets an owner and a date. Not a team, a person. “Design” is not an owner. When Amara and I tried the team version for a quarter, 14 of 19 open questions were still open at the end of it. With names and dates attached, we closed 11 of 16 over the next one.

What I left out

There is no field for attendees’ roles, no agenda timings, no “parking lot” section. I tried a parking lot and it became a place where topics went to die quietly. If a topic matters, it gets its own meeting or its own note.

For the review meetings specifically, I follow it with the checklist from design review rules, which is a separate file because it changes less often.