We run the company meeting-light, and bias toward "maker time." We've done a good job of this so far. But as we grow we need to stay vigilant and avoid falling prey prey to terminal meeting creep.

Good meetings usually involve small groups making decisions or discussing specific ideas. They also have a clear owner, a written agenda, and identifiable outcomes. Here are some examples:

• A sprint kickoff where a team makes decisions on what to work on next
• A recurring team meeting where the lead is responsible for creating a specific agenda
• A “jam” where a group fleshes out an idea, and decides where to take it
• Regular 1x1s with your Lead, or other folks you work closely with

If you want to have a meeting like this, don’t hesitate to schedule it, and certainly don’t worry you’re going to get in trouble. By all means, meet! Go for it!

That said, bad meetings are the bane of productivity and should be cancelled with prejudice. Any meeting – especially a recurring one – with more than a handful of people should be treated with skepticism. A 7-person agendaless, decisionless, recurring “catchup” or “checkin” is almost always a waste of time. These can feel busy and productive, but most people are tuned out, you’re not actually getting anything done, and taking time away from our time doing real things – like writing code, talking to customers, or building teams.

This is doubly the case if the participants are the most important people at Hex: ICs doing actual work. For these people, it's not just about count of meetings – it's about how they're scheduled. A bunch of interrupts during the day basically ruins the ability to do anything significant. If you've never read the classic "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" essay, I highly encourage you take 5 minutes to do so.

There's a lot of alternatives. Write a doc. Record a Loom. Get together with a smaller group, or appoint a DRI to make the decision without a bunch of synchronous syncs. A big recurring meeting should be a last resort.

And if you find yourself with lots of these on your calendar, it should be a moment of reflection. Does our team trust each other enough to make the right decision and get things done? Do we have clear DRIs? Do we not have better things to be doing?

This is important to get right as we scale. Meetings can proliferate exponentially as people do, in a perverse n^2 pattern – most companies run this way, and if we don't want to we have to be really vigilant and clear about our cultural norms.

The goal is that we never get to a point where we have to take the kind of drastic measures bigger companies have had to. Instead, we're going to continue to be diligent about prioritizing doing real work, and respecting each other’s time.