You’ve been in that meeting. Everyone’s looking at a slide deck on the shared screen, and half the room is quietly doing something else on their own monitor. Prepping for the next one, probably. Which will go exactly the same way.

Agendas were supposed to fix this. They didn’t. A list of topics isn’t a destination. It’s just a longer way to drift.

TDD (one of the core XP practices) says write the test before you write the code. Before you build anything, define what passing looks like. The test makes the goal concrete and tells you when you’re done.

Do the same thing for meetings.

Before you send the invite, write one sentence: “This meeting is a success when…”

Something like: “…we’ve agreed on which candidates from this list we’re extending offers to,” or “…we have a shared understanding of what caused last week’s production fire and how to prevent the next one”

It allows you to park anything that tangentially arises. It gives the meeting a real finish line instead of a time slot.

Put the condition in the invite. People who care about that outcome show up. If they don’t, the decision gets made without them. That was already the deal.

When you hit the condition early, end the meeting. Give people the remaining time back. Don’t fill the time just because it was booked.

Do this consistently enough and something shifts. People show up expecting your meetings to have a finish line. They pay attention because the conversation has somewhere to go.

Some of them might even look forward to it. That might sound unlikely. But it happens.