Meeting is a problem word

You don't have meetings outside work or other professional contexts. Or at least I hope you don't.

Instead, you meet a friend for coffee or lunch. Or you meet your mates to play football (or in my case, board games). You don't say you're having a meeting when visiting your parents.

You meet someone in order to do something, even if that something is just catching up and enjoying the company of the other person.

Yet in work contexts we overemphasise the meeting and pay little attention to the doing. Many meetings are such hodgepodges of topics that there is no room left for any kind of clarity on what was supposed to get done in the meeting.

So instead of just calling in a meeting, think first what you want to get done, and why you need to meet with other people in order to do that. Then bring that clarity to the meeting invitation: "we will meet in order to (insert reason here)" / "we will meet so that we can (purpose)."

Be brutally honest about the reason, and whether or not that reason is actually good enough to ask for other people's time. Time that they could spend on other tasks and activities instead.

In the words of Frank Herbert: "Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree."

If the real reason is that "we will meet so that we can satisfy the organisational requirement of having regular meetings," or "we will meet in order to have meetings because that is what we have done for the past 15 years," it might be time to try something different. There are other ways to communicate and collaborate.