Running Meetings People Don't Hate: What Middle School Student Council Taught Me

If you can keep twenty-five eighth-graders focused and productive in a middle school classroom on a Friday afternoon, you can run a board meeting at Google.

Most meetings in tech are painful because people use them as a substitute for actual work. People ramble, tangents derail the topic, and forty-five minutes later everyone leaves without knowing who is doing what.

Here are the rules that kept our student council meetings—and now my startup team syncs—efficient:

The Three Rules of Great Meetings

1. State the desired output in sentence one: *"By the end of these fifteen minutes, we need to decide between Option A and Option B for our database migration."*
2. Assign a ruthless timekeeper: When discussion wanders into tangential topics, intervene immediately: *"Great point, let's park that in the async notes document and stay focused on the primary decision."*
3. End the meeting the second the decision is made: If a scheduled 30-minute meeting finishes its objective in twelve minutes, end the call immediately. Give people their time back.

Key Takeaways

• Silence is better than filler: If there's nothing urgent to discuss, cancel the meeting.
• Always recap decisions in writing: A decision that isn't written down in public documentation was never truly decided.
• Respect creates trust: People show up prepared when they know their time won't be squandered.