Book the Meeting Before You Need It

Book the Meeting Before You Need It As companies get larger, scheduling a decision starts to take longer than making it. Decisions that used to get alignment in an hour now “can only happen three weeks from now, once Michael and Melissa are both back.” The problem goes deeper than big decisions. Daily operational decisions on things like on-call can become impossible to make at all. Teams that need rapid alignment end up in Slack threads that linger and die before end of day, right before the same incident happens again overnight. The answer is blindingly simple: book recurring time that exists only for as-needed, cross-functional meetings. A Simple Example Every day, everyone in the department holds the same 30-minute block for as-needed operational alignment. It may not be booked over by anyone, for any reason, except cross-team operational needs. If the day arrives and the block isn’t needed, cancel it. If it is needed, the necessary attendees join and discuss. Triggering criteria…