12 hours of my calendar this week are meetings, up from maybe 4 last year. Our org roughly doubled since January and my work flipped from mostly-making to mostly-meeting. I keep staring at our cross-team sync where we re-read status docs everyone already wrote, and the pre-review we hold days before the design review. I canceled the pre-review twice and nothing broke, which made me suspicious of everything else. Which meetings did you kill versus keep? How do you tell load-bearing coordination from inertia?
Which meetings did you kill versus keep?
Cancel each once, keep what screams.
Last fall with 34 engineers I tried exactly this purge and it blew up within weeks. Killed four syncs cold because nobody could defend them live. Within two weeks every real decision had slid into DMs and side threads where nobody else could find them or follow what was decided. Same roadmap call got relitigated three times by three groups, each convinced they were final. Total churn for a month. Ended up reinstating one 25-minute weekly sync just to give decisions a place to stick. Felt like defeat, but the relitigation stopped. What do you do when the same decision keeps coming back after you killed the room where it used to get made?
Keisha, with 40 engineers my rule is no decision lives only in a room. We keep one doc with the decision, the decider, and the date, linked right where each killed meeting used to live. It replaced two of my own recurring syncs. When someone reopens a settled call, we point at the line. Relitigation dies on sight and the cancellations hold.
Luis, that log becomes another graveyard nobody trusts within weeks unless one named person owns and updates each line.
The graveyard is real, Alex. We stopped assigning an owner and made whoever wants the decision write the line before the release train review counts. No writer, no slot, no log-keeper to quit. Has anyone else tried pushing the writing back on the requester?