In the race to make meetings more efficient, we’ve built a digital arsenal: live notetakers, auto-transcripts, smart summaries, nudges to stay on time, and follow-up action item trackers. These tools are impressive. They do make meetings smoother, more structured, and sometimes even more inclusive.

But here’s the uncomfortable question: Are we just polishing a broken process?

Most meeting optimization tools are built on a core assumption: that the meeting needs to happen in the first place. The result? Teams spend more time making inefficient meetings slightly less painful, instead of asking the tougher, more strategic question: Could we have avoided this meeting entirely?

The Hidden Cost of "Better" Meetings

Let’s say a 45-minute meeting involves six people. That’s 4.5 collective hours. Add in context switching, prep time, and follow-up, and it balloons even further. If the meeting doesn't result in clear decisions or progress, it's a sunk cost, no matter how well-optimized it was.

Improving how we run meetings often distracts from improving how we plan them.

Preemptive Clarity Beats Reactive Structure

Imagine if half the effort put into optimizing meetings was spent upfront: clarifying the purpose, defining the decision at hand, or exploring whether async collaboration could suffice.

- Would that 45-minute status update be better as a 10-minute async roundup?

- Could a clear pre-read have replaced the entire discussion?

- Might one person making a call (with input from others) have avoided the group debate?

When teams default to meetings, no amount of live note-taking or AI summaries will fix the core issue: meetings that didn’t need to happen in the first place.

The Optimization Trap

Meeting tools often sell "peace of mind" to managers: Don’t worry about messy conversations or wasted time, we’ll clean it up for you.

But optimization is reactive by nature. It treats symptoms (unclear takeaways, disengagement, information loss) instead of the root cause (unclear purpose, wrong format, bad timing).

We need to move from reaction to prevention.

Better Questions to Ask Before Every Meeting

Instead of jumping straight to optimization, start with:

- What decision are we trying to make?

- Is this a conversation or a broadcast?

- Who actually needs to be involved?

- What context can be shared ahead of time?

- Could async tools (docs, voice notes, comments) do the job better?

These questions shift the burden from retroactive efficiency to proactive clarity.

Don't Just Make Meetings Better, Make Fewer of Them

There's value in great meeting hygiene. But there's more value in ruthless prioritization. The best meeting is the one you never had because the work happened elsewhere, faster and with more focus.

Tools should help us get to the point, not just document how we meandered around it.

As teams embrace async work and distributed decision-making, the goal isn't just to optimize meetings. It's to question them.

‍