Stop Building Your Meetings From Scratch

Be honest with me. How many times have you intended to plan a real agenda for a meeting and then didn’t? Maybe you had a few minutes to jot down some thoughts. Maybe you dug up your last agenda for this type of meeting and gave it a quick update. Maybe you asked AI to help and got something kind of reasonable.

Or maybe you started, got pulled into something else, and told yourself you'll figure it out later. Then it's later, and you've got a vague sense of what you wanted to accomplish, or a rough agenda that no one else has seen, so nobody in the room had a chance to prepare. Everyone's just winging it.

That's the tax most of us pay for treating every meeting like a one-off. There's a better way, and it's not complicated. It's called a meeting portfolio: a set of standardized templates for the meetings you run regularly, so the next time that meeting comes up, you're not starting from scratch.

Effective Meetings Need to Be Designed

Most managers run somewhere between five and ten meetings on repeat: a weekly team meeting, one-on-ones, a monthly all-hands, a brainstorm, a project kickoff, a postmortem. And most of us do one of two things with them.

Either we treat every single instance like it's brand new, figuring out the agenda from zero every time, which is exhausting. Or we just reuse whatever we did last time and tweak it, which is better, but only works if last time was actually good.

The managers I've seen get the best results do something different. They spend real time upfront designing the meeting well, once, and then they stop having to think about it.

Build a Meeting Portfolio

Start by identifying the meetings you run most often, whatever shows up on your calendar again and again. For each one, build a reusable template with a few specific pieces.

First, give it a clear name. Something like "Problem-Solving Session" or "Project Kickoff" tells everyone exactly what they're walking into before the meeting even starts. It sounds small, but it sets expectations instantly.

Second, write down the purpose. Why does this meeting exist, and what does it need to accomplish? A weekly team meeting built to realign on work looks completely different from one built for problem-solving, or one built for relationship building and motivation. That distinction shapes everything that comes next.

Third, design a consistent structure: how you open, the types of questions you ask during the check-in, what happens in the middle, and how you close with a recap of decisions and next steps. Get specific. Do you always run a round robin? Do you always ask the same set of questions? How much time goes to each piece? The more robust this is, the more it becomes your map for actually running the meeting.

The last piece is pre-work: what needs to happen before the meeting, both from you and from the people in the room. Before a plus-delta, maybe you want people to reflect on what worked and what didn't. Before a quarterly goals alignment, maybe you want them to come with an updated status. Before a project kickoff, maybe you always send a one-page context doc so people walk in with the background already in their heads.

Put all of this together, name, purpose, structure, and pre-work, and you have a template. From here on, you just follow it.

If you want a head start, my 10-Minute Meeting Blueprint walks you through a guided, AI-assisted conversation to design a meeting that can become your template in under ten minutes.

It Won't Be Perfect on the First Try

A template gives you a strong starting point, but expect to iterate. Try a component, ask your team for feedback, adjust the timing if something needed twenty minutes instead of ten. If a piece of the design doesn't hold up, change it. Say, "We're going to try it this way and see how it goes," and the next time, "Here's what we learned, let's adjust this one piece." That's how you improve a meeting instead of just reinventing it every week.

Once a meeting is working, lock it in. You don't need to revisit it again until something real changes, like the goal shifts, the team changes, or it's no longer serving you.

Build Your First Template

Pick one meeting you run regularly and write down how it actually runs today: how long it is, who's usually in the room, what you usually do, whether there's any pre-work or people just show up.

Then write down what you want it to be. What's the actual purpose? What should people do before they arrive? What happens in the first five minutes, step by step through the middle, and how you want it to close? Save what you've written. That's your first template.

Next time that meeting rolls around, you're not starting from scratch. You pull out what you designed, customize it if the situation calls for it, and run it. Ask for feedback, adjust, and keep going. That's the whole shift: from designing every meeting from zero to designing it once and using it over and over and over.

The Modern Manager is a leadership podcast for rockstar managers who want to close the gap between knowing what good management is and actually doing it.

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