You get the invite. No description. No agenda. No attached document. Just a title like “Quick sync” and a 30-minute calendar hold. You accept it anyway, because what else are you going to do — decline a meeting with your skip-level?
I’ve written before about how meetings should be a point of escalation, not a starting point. But the agenda-free meeting is an even more fundamental failure mode: it’s a meeting that hasn’t even bothered to justify its own existence.
So I made a site about it: noagendanomeeting.net.
Why this matters
A meeting without an agenda is like calling a function without documentation — sure, it might do what you expect, but you’re forcing every caller to read the implementation to find out. Meetings without agendas force everyone to context-switch twice: once to figure out what it’s about, and again in the meeting itself when they arrive unprepared.
The average knowledge worker already spends 40% of their workweek in meetings. Without clear goals, those meetings drift, no decisions get made, and everyone leaves wondering if that could’ve been an email. (It could’ve.)
The thesis
The site’s core argument: writing scales; meetings don’t. Before you send that invite, ask yourself: can this start as a document instead?
If the answer is yes — and it almost always is — write first, meet second. If you do need a meeting, include an agenda, attach a read-ahead, and state the decision you’re trying to make. This isn’t radical advice. It’s basic async-first communication hygiene.
What to do about it
Next time you get a meeting invite without an agenda, try something wild: decline it. Or better yet, reply asking for one. You can even send them the link — noagendanomeeting.net is a lot more diplomatic than “I’m not attending your agenda-free ambush.”
If you manage like an engineer, you already know that undefined inputs produce undefined outputs. Meetings are no different. Define the problem before you schedule the standup.
Check it out at noagendanomeeting.net, and the next time someone sends you a mystery meeting, you’ll know exactly what link to send back.