A buddy of mine had the same issue and wanted to try to do something about it. We did months of research on meetings, which was actually pretty interesting and revealing. Both of us having analytical backgrounds, traced the issue back to a main root cause: unprepared meetings. Call it breaking it down to its first principles. We also realized that many meeting softwares were actually focusing on the wrong problem.

Some interesting stats we found: 65% of meeting owners never prepare. Also, only ~30% of meeting attendees found the meetings they attended impactful, despite ~80% of owners thinking otherwise. A clear gap.

The core issues we identified were:

- Lack of agendas, talking points, and objectives - Excessive participants, often unnecessary - Absence of structure and clear outcomes - No feedback to meeting owners

We tested this finding out ourselves in our meetings by:

- Establishing a single defined objective (i.e. what we want to leave the meeting with hitting) - Articulating thoughtful talking points well ahead of time - Limiting attendees to those with assigned talking points (max 3-4 people per meeting) - Asking for honest meeting feedback from our attendees - Politely declining unnecessary meetings, including 1:1s

The result after only 1-2 weeks: A remarkable 10-hour reduction in weekly meeting load, giving me back an entire workday and eliminating the need for evening and weekend work.

It was pretty wild how well this worked, but the key to keeping it this way was consistency.

We asked our colleagues and friends if they had similar issues with meetings and were astonished how common this was. SOO.. we developed an in-calendar tool that makes meeting preparation as simple as practicably possible. This tool streamlines the creation of crisp, structured agendas with impactful talking points, ensures only necessary people are invited, and makes it easy for attendees to provide feedback to meeting owners --- all of this in less than 2 mins.

**Check it out in action here: https://www.loom.com/share/d241273abef4418597ba3af3ab46e323

To the Hacker News community: Do you also struggle with heavy loads of unproductive meetings? Do you find meeting preparation is the best way to improve bad meetings? What else do you do to help yourself and others with improving unproductive meetings? We're trying to prioritize what features we should build next. We have many ideas, but want some collective input.

Suggestions welcome!