Authors and entrepreneurs Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson write in their book Rework that “interruption is the enemy of productivity,” and that meetings are the worst type of interruption.

Here a few of the reasons they think meetings can be “toxic”:

They lack focus: Many meetings don’t have clear agendas, and as a result they tend to drift chaotically from one topic to another.

They’re scheduled like TV shows: The amount of time allotted for a meeting is usually dependent on the scheduling software that’s being used (e.g., 30 minutes). For example, no one ever schedules a 7 minute meeting – but if that’s how long it would take to achieve the meeting’s goal, that’s all the time you need.

They’re costly: When you bring 5 people together for a one-hour meeting, it’s actually a five-hour meeting because you’re trading 5 hours of productivity for 1 hour of meeting. The cost could be even higher if you factor in the “mental switching costs that come with stopping what you’re doing, going somewhere else to meet, and then resuming what were you doing beforehand.”

But sometimes you need to have a meeting. In those cases, Fried an Heinemeier Hansson recommend the following tips: 

Meetings are essential to effective decision making and execution in companies.

As Bain & Company management consultants Michael Mankins and Jenny Davis-Peccoud point out in a Bain Brief article, the companies that are best at making decisions “have learned to manage their meetings as carefully as they manage any other part of their business.”

To help ensure that meetings have a clear purpose and achieve their objectives, Mankins and Davis-Peccoud recommend using a framework called “IDD,” for Inform, Discuss, and Decide.

According to their research, staff at the University of California, Berkeley are expected to begin each meeting with the following statement: “The purpose of this meeting is to inform you about X, to discuss Y, and to decide on Z.”

Organizing meetings this way has the following two benefits:

You can also use each of the 3 functions of the IDD framework to determine the focus of an entire meeting.

Switching around the order, here’s an example of how the framework might be used by a team to launch a new initiative within a broader organization:

Author and marketing guru Seth Godin has proposed the below seven-point checklist for a meeting that he would agree to join. 

He asks: “Can your next meeting (not conversation, not presentation, but meeting) pass this test?”

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”

- Author Annie Dillard in her book The Writing Life