My biggest professional pet peeve? Bad meetings.

Time is everyone's most valuable commodity, and meetings often take up much more of it than they deserve to. But fixing your meeting culture is hard. It isn't a simple one-time reset: so many companies teach bad meeting practices that unlearning them takes time.

The reason I care so much about better meetings isn't just about cutting down on wasted time. Running great meetings at Blaze has paid dividends everywhere: our team is happier, we learn together faster, and our collaboration is more focused.

If you're used to big-company culture, my approach to meetings will sound like heresy. But we want to move faster than companies 10x our size and win, and the only way we'll get there is by doing things differently. Here's our playbook.

My 3 Biggest Issues With Bad Meetings

You can feel it in the air—even over Zoom—when a meeting is a waste of time. You show up and there's no agenda. You or others get distracted. The slew of updates could have been an email.

Here are the telltale signs a meeting isn't working:

1/ The meeting doesn't have a purpose or an agenda.

Think how many meetings you go to where no one really knows the goal of getting together. It's more than you think—even at "lean" startups.

Most management cultures reward the appearance of time spent on "work" more than results. Even smart, talented people who have spent time in orgs with these values learn to keep their calendars unnecessarily full to broadcast that they're contributing.

Unfortunately, this pulls everyone into useless time sucks, slows projects down, and disincentivizes impact.

2/ The meeting is focused on process updates or work inputs, not insights or collaboration.

Just as scheduling unnecessary meetings can be tempting, too many small-group standup meetings can devolve into round-robin updates on recent tasks completed.

Wasting sync time on basic updates snuffs out more productive uses. While status updates can almost always be conveyed in an email, sharing learnings, brainstorming, or asking for feedback are quicker, easier, and richer when done live.

3/ The meeting was once useful but has outlived its purpose

It's way easier to add a new meeting than to delete a recurring one. Project needs change over time, but calendar inertia means "zombie" meetings can stick around long after they're useful unless it's someone's job to regularly cut or modify them.

How We Do Meetings at Blaze

There's a better way. As the leader of a distributed team, I know how effective meetings can be at keeping everyone motivated and collaborative. At Blaze, asking what truly needs to get done in meetings—and what doesn't—lets us plan effective standups, all hands meetings, and 1:1s.

Standups

Every team at Blaze has a regular daily standup meeting—but these standups aren't what you'd expect. Instead of status updates, every person either demos their work or gives an analysis of their progress against their performance metric.

On the marketing side, everyone knows what metric they should be moving and what their expected performance is. So our team uses standups to ask for what they need—resources, collaboration, guidance—to make progress against their goal.

In engineering and design standups, everyone shows work daily, and we all provide live feedback. Submitting work for critique every day is the only effective way to get better, and we can iterate faster if we do it live.

Some best practices we use to run our standups:

1. For all teams, have an agenda that starts with reviewing metrics and progress against goals.

2. For engineering and design teams, use most of the time to review work-in-progress features and give feedback collaboratively.

3. Keep standups to under 10 team members to facilitate actual conversations.

4. Adjust standup agendas, cadence, and who needs to be there as project needs change.

5. As a manager, focus on unblocking your team with active listening and great feedback.

A note about metrics

I'm careful not to let metrics updates turn into a rote run-through of the numbers. So many other companies run this way, but we don't want the spreadsheet to control the meeting.

When I worked in consulting, we had a popular concept called "answer first:" you start with your conclusion or plan first, and then back it up with data points and reasoning. 

We use that format for all updates: I ask everyone not just to read out whether they're ahead or behind, but to share their proactive plan upfront so we can all offer support.

1:1s

We use 1:1s sporadically. I've found that small-group standups are more efficient at moving work forward. But there are still important reasons to get together 1:1. Often, they're the only way to build meaningful, trusting personal relationships with your team.

Because everyone's personal needs vary over time, my approach is to let the frequency of my 1:1s ebb and flow. That means that I meet with most people on the team about every six weeks, but I'll add extra checkins if I feel a need to provide acute support.

Some of my favorite principles for planning 1:1s:

1. Connect as needed with people you work most closely with: some things are easier to tackle with a 15-minute phone call than over Slack or email.

2. Don't be afraid to cancel 1:1s, but also lean in if you sense something off in standup, or sense an opportunity to build the relationship in a key moment.

3. Focus your energy as a leader on unblocking collaborative work in standups, leaving 1:1s for connecting with people personally and building trust and respect.

All Hands

Our weekly all hands meetings have a clear purpose: sharing cross-team learning, inspiring and motivating people around our strategy, and reinforcing our values and culture.

Every week, everyone gives a concise demo of their work in 90 seconds or less. We then do a "virtues retro," where team members read kudos out loud to highlight where we saw others contributing to our success. It's a great way to celebrate people for doing high-impact work and collaborating well.

To wrap each all hands up, I give a little sermon; we call it "wisdom." I started it years ago so meetings didn't end awkwardly, and people have insisted that I keep it up. I've heard it helps the team understand what's on my mind around our strategy, priorities, and decisions, considering most people only see me for 15 minutes a day in a standup.

The Zero-Based Budgeting Approach

Getting standups, all hands, and one-on-ones right isn't a one-time affair. In fact, it all falls apart if we don't treat the calendar as a living organism that needs constant adjustment.

Roughly every four weeks, I look at my calendar and ask: am I using my time 100% optimally? I often start over entirely by deleting all recurring meetings and then asking "What do I miss from my calendar? Who do I need to meet with?" 

I call this "zero-based budgeting" for meetings, and it's a tactic that ties everything else I do together. Without it, the work we put in to justify and structure meetings fades over time.

Why This Is Hard (And Worth It)

Doing meetings better has taken a lot of conscious effort. It means reminding people why we're getting together, how people should prepare, and what's expected more often than you'd think.

I've also noticed that with some of our newer hires, adjusting to a culture where demoing, reviewing metrics, and collaborating around feedback every single day can be challenging—because no one is ahead of their metrics 100% of the time, and smart people don't like to feel behind.

But something magical happens when people learn why we run our meetings this way. It encourages them to create bold goals, focus on work that moves the needle, experiment and learn quickly, and lean on the team to be better than we could be alone. When that clicks, people get excited about taking bigger swings, even if they don't all pay off.

Why Our Meeting Culture Works

Our team is able to move more quickly and purposefully than much bigger and better resourced companies because of how we meet. Overall, how we work together is one of our greatest competitive advantages.

And the silver lining is how much time I've gotten back for the kind of work that's best done on my own, like big picture thinking about where we're going or reflecting on customer feedback.

So get into your calendar and take a hard look at how you're spending your time. Start cutting the fat and reallocating your day to what matters. Do it all over again 4 weeks later.

If ripping off the band-aid feels scary, ask yourself: "what would I do with 5 extra hours this week?"

I'd love to hear what you come up with—my inbox is always open!