By Dominick Miserandino, CEO, RTM Nexus
I was talking with Tim Zawislack recently and mentioned something that used to strike people as strange when I ran team meetings: I’d set a goal to get the weekly meeting down to eight minutes, then six. People thought I was nuts. I wasn’t trying to avoid the team, I like the team. I just don’t believe in filling a clock that doesn’t need filling.
The 30-minute default is a trap
Most meeting culture runs on a scheduling default, not an actual need. Calendar tools hand you 30-minute blocks, and somewhere along the way we all decided the block needs to be filled rather than used. If the actual business gets done in eight minutes, you don’t owe the remaining 22 minutes to anyone. I’ve watched plenty of meetings where the useful content wrapped up in the first third, and the rest of the time went to restating things, filling space, or manufacturing discussion because ending early felt wrong.
That instinct, that a shorter meeting somehow shortchanges the people in it, has it backwards. What actually shortchanges people is making them sit through 22 minutes of nothing because the calendar said thirty.
Goal-oriented beats clock-oriented
The useful question isn’t “how do I fill this time” it’s “what do I actually need to decide here.” Sometimes that’s a five-minute conversation standing outside a CVS. Sometimes it’s a real 45-minute session because there’s genuinely 45 minutes of substance. The length should follow the content, not the other way around. When you flip that, and start deciding meeting length in advance regardless of what’s actually being discussed, you end up either rushing something that needed more room or padding something that didn’t.
I try to apply this literally: can I get the weekly team meeting down to eight minutes without losing anything real? If yes, great, that’s eight minutes of everyone’s actual attention instead of thirty minutes where people mentally check out halfway through. And separately, if the team wants to hang out, connect, catch up personally, that’s valuable too, but it doesn’t need to be disguised as a status meeting to justify happening. Let the working meeting be short and sharp, and let the social time be its own thing, done on its own terms.
What this looks like day to day
In practice this means asking, before any meeting gets scheduled, what specifically needs to be decided or communicated, and sizing the meeting to that, not to a default block on the calendar. It means being comfortable ending a meeting in eight minutes even if it was booked for thirty, without treating the extra time as owed to anyone. And it means noticing when a meeting exists only because it always has, a recurring slot nobody has questioned in months, and asking honestly whether it’s still earning its place on the calendar.
None of this is about running meetings coldly or valuing efficiency over people. It’s closer to the opposite: respecting people’s time enough not to manufacture busywork to fill a block, and trusting that a decision made in eight minutes is just as real as one padded out to thirty.
This piece grew out of a conversation with Tim Zawislack, available here.