Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem

The authors of this piece have been studying how organizations can make the right things easier and the wrong things harder since 2014. In every workplace they’ve studied, helped, or worked at, they’ve found that meetings create wasteful and soul-crushing friction. To find out how to reduce that friction by “repairing” meetings, they conducted two studies — “Meeting Doomsday” and a “Meeting Reset” — at Asana, a company that builds work-management software. They used what they learned to create a step-by-step guide to help managers identify, eliminate, and repair broken meetings. Here, they discuss five key ingredients for success.