What does it mean that meeting hygiene?

Every meeting needs a purpose, an agenda, a time limit, and clear outputs — and most meetings fail not because they exist but because they lack these structural elements.

Example: A product team holds a weekly 60-minute status meeting. Twelve people attend. Nobody prepares. The first twenty minutes are spent figuring out what to discuss. The next thirty become a meandering conversation between two engineers about a bug that affects only their subsystem. The final ten are a rushed attempt to assign action items that nobody writes down. The meeting cost the organization twelve person-hours and produced nothing that couldn't have been captured in a five-minute async update. The problem wasn't that the meeting existed — it was that the meeting had no structural hygiene: no stated purpose, no agenda, no time constraint on individual topics, and no mechanism for capturing outputs.

Try this: Select three meetings from your calendar this week. For each one, answer four questions before the meeting starts: What is the specific purpose of this meeting — what decision needs to be made or what problem needs to be solved? What is the agenda — the ordered list of topics with time allocations? What is the hard stop time? What outputs must exist when the meeting ends — decisions documented, action items assigned, next steps clarified? If you cannot answer all four questions for a meeting, either restructure it until you can or cancel it. After the meeting, check whether the promised outputs actually materialized. This audit reveals which of your meetings have structural integrity and which are consuming time without producing value.