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Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done
From Rebecca Hinds, PhD—organizational expert who has helped Fortune 500 companies fix their fractured collaboration—comes a bold, battle-tested blueprint for tackling the workplace’s biggest meetings.
Meetings are broken. They are relics from a bygone era of top-down hierarchies and factory-like procedures—designed to issue orders, flaunt power, and keep the hierarchy intact. In today’s digital, collaborate-or-bust era, this model isn’t just inefficient, it actively harms employees and organizations.
Drawing on decades of research and stories from leading companies like Google, Salesforce, Pixar, YouTube, and Dropbox, Your Best Meeting Ever provides a blueprint to transform your meetings from monotonous, soul-crushing time sinks into powerful tools for collaboration. The secret? Treat them like products. Using seven product design principles, you’ll turn your meetings into well-designed products that actually drive work forward and serve your most important users—the people in your organization. You’ll
- Why every organization needs a “Meeting Doomsday” to reset collaboration, and how to strategically orchestrate one at your company.
- How to fix your communication system so meetings are a last resort, not a knee-jerk default.
- Which meeting metrics matter—and which do more harm than good.
- How to inject moments of delight into your meetings so people genuinely want to show up.
- When to integrate technology into your meetings so you enhance collaboration, rather detract from it.
More than just a practical guide, Your Best Meeting Ever is a rallying call to rethink how we collaborate in the modern workplace. Whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, this powerful book will nudge you to be audacious—to challenge the existing norms and embrace new paradigms—so you’ll never dread another meeting again.
Meetings are broken. They are relics from a bygone era of top-down hierarchies and factory-like procedures—designed to issue orders, flaunt power, and keep the hierarchy intact. In today’s digital, collaborate-or-bust era, this model isn’t just inefficient, it actively harms employees and organizations.
Drawing on decades of research and stories from leading companies like Google, Salesforce, Pixar, YouTube, and Dropbox, Your Best Meeting Ever provides a blueprint to transform your meetings from monotonous, soul-crushing time sinks into powerful tools for collaboration. The secret? Treat them like products. Using seven product design principles, you’ll turn your meetings into well-designed products that actually drive work forward and serve your most important users—the people in your organization. You’ll
- Why every organization needs a “Meeting Doomsday” to reset collaboration, and how to strategically orchestrate one at your company.
- How to fix your communication system so meetings are a last resort, not a knee-jerk default.
- Which meeting metrics matter—and which do more harm than good.
- How to inject moments of delight into your meetings so people genuinely want to show up.
- When to integrate technology into your meetings so you enhance collaboration, rather detract from it.
More than just a practical guide, Your Best Meeting Ever is a rallying call to rethink how we collaborate in the modern workplace. Whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, this powerful book will nudge you to be audacious—to challenge the existing norms and embrace new paradigms—so you’ll never dread another meeting again.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published February 3, 2026
41 people are currently reading
533 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 8, 2026
If you've ever sat through a mind-numbing meeting wondering "Why am I here?" or found yourself trapped in calendar carnage with no time for actual work, Dr. Rebecca Hinds' Your Best Meeting Ever is the wake-up call you desperately need. This isn't another corporate self-help book filled with platitudes about "adding agendas" or "respecting everyone's time." This is a full-scale manifesto that treats meetings as what they truly are: the most expensive, broken, and overlooked products in your organization.
Hinds opens with a fascinating historical hook that immediately grabbed me—the revelation that weaponizing meetings was literally a WWII sabotage tactic from the OSS's Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
The core premise is powerful: treat your meetings like products. Not just any products, but the most important ones in your organization. Suddenly, meetings need to justify their cost, demonstrate value, incorporate user feedback, and be iterated upon. Hinds structures the book around seven meeting design principles, each addressing a specific dysfunction. My favorite is Volume (Cut Your Meeting Debt). The concept of "meeting debt" is genius—like technical debt in software, it's the accumulation of outdated, bloated meetings that strangle productivity. Hinds provides a five-step framework for launching calendar cleanses (including how to run your own "Meeting Doomsday") and preventing debt from building back up.
What I appreciate most is that Hinds doesn't prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution. She acknowledges that different organizations have different dysfunctions and encourages readers to start with their biggest pain points.
The writing is sharp, witty, and refreshingly honest. Hinds doesn't pull punches when describing the absurdity of modern meeting culture—executives who use "Sorry, I'm double-booked" as a status flex, meetings that function as theater rather than work, the pandemic-era panic that led managers to schedule even MORE meetings because they couldn't "manage by walking around." She peppers the book with memorable anecdotes.
The case studies are compelling and varied. Beyond the famous calendar purges at Dropbox, Shopify, and Slack, Hinds shares results from her own Meeting Doomsday experiments. She explains the behavioral science behind why a full calendar cleanse works better than incremental audits (citing Daniel Kahneman's work on breaking old habits through deep reflection). The book is rich with both research citations and practical implementation details.
Perhaps most importantly, this book acknowledges a truth most meeting advice ignores: quick fixes won't save us. No amount of agendas, meeting cost calculators, No-Meeting Days, or AI note-takers will fix fundamentally broken systems. Meetings aren't broken because someone forgot to add structure. They're broken by design.
Your Best Meeting Ever is essential reading for anyone who attends meetings. Whether you're an individual contributor sick of wasting time, a manager drowning in meeting debt, or an executive wondering why your organization can't get anything done despite being in meetings all day, this book provides a clear, actionable, and hopeful path forward.
Hinds has written the definitive guide for fixing the modern workplace's most expensive and overlooked problem. Buy it, read it, and start designing meetings that don't just fill calendars—they actually work.
Hinds opens with a fascinating historical hook that immediately grabbed me—the revelation that weaponizing meetings was literally a WWII sabotage tactic from the OSS's Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
The core premise is powerful: treat your meetings like products. Not just any products, but the most important ones in your organization. Suddenly, meetings need to justify their cost, demonstrate value, incorporate user feedback, and be iterated upon. Hinds structures the book around seven meeting design principles, each addressing a specific dysfunction. My favorite is Volume (Cut Your Meeting Debt). The concept of "meeting debt" is genius—like technical debt in software, it's the accumulation of outdated, bloated meetings that strangle productivity. Hinds provides a five-step framework for launching calendar cleanses (including how to run your own "Meeting Doomsday") and preventing debt from building back up.
What I appreciate most is that Hinds doesn't prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution. She acknowledges that different organizations have different dysfunctions and encourages readers to start with their biggest pain points.
The writing is sharp, witty, and refreshingly honest. Hinds doesn't pull punches when describing the absurdity of modern meeting culture—executives who use "Sorry, I'm double-booked" as a status flex, meetings that function as theater rather than work, the pandemic-era panic that led managers to schedule even MORE meetings because they couldn't "manage by walking around." She peppers the book with memorable anecdotes.
The case studies are compelling and varied. Beyond the famous calendar purges at Dropbox, Shopify, and Slack, Hinds shares results from her own Meeting Doomsday experiments. She explains the behavioral science behind why a full calendar cleanse works better than incremental audits (citing Daniel Kahneman's work on breaking old habits through deep reflection). The book is rich with both research citations and practical implementation details.
Perhaps most importantly, this book acknowledges a truth most meeting advice ignores: quick fixes won't save us. No amount of agendas, meeting cost calculators, No-Meeting Days, or AI note-takers will fix fundamentally broken systems. Meetings aren't broken because someone forgot to add structure. They're broken by design.
Your Best Meeting Ever is essential reading for anyone who attends meetings. Whether you're an individual contributor sick of wasting time, a manager drowning in meeting debt, or an executive wondering why your organization can't get anything done despite being in meetings all day, this book provides a clear, actionable, and hopeful path forward.
Hinds has written the definitive guide for fixing the modern workplace's most expensive and overlooked problem. Buy it, read it, and start designing meetings that don't just fill calendars—they actually work.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This book opens with literal wartime sabotage tactics… and the wildest part is that it’s not even a metaphor. The CIA once told citizens to weaponize meetings during WWII to make enemy systems collapse under bureaucratic nonsense, and Rebecca Hinds is here like, “Cool, now let’s unweaponize them before Carol from Marketing drags us into another soul-leeching sync with 14 agenda items and zero vibes.”
Your Best Meeting Ever is basically the Marie Kondo of workplace dysfunction. But instead of asking what sparks joy, it’s asking, “Why are you holding a thirty-minute meeting for something that could’ve been a six-line Slack thread, Greg?” And I love that. I want that needlepointed on a pillow and flung directly into the nearest conference room.
What makes this book sing is that it doesn’t just roast bad meetings, it autopsies them. Hinds breaks down every shade of meeting chaos, from the bloated advisory groups that multiplied like gremlins after midnight, to the dreaded “cost calculator” moment where you realize your quick check-in is bleeding the company of $700 in salaried time. (Yes, I winced. Yes, I did math I immediately regretted.)
Her tone isn’t exactly spicy, this is still a professional blueprint, not a rage-text from someone trapped in a calendar spiral, but the case studies slap. Dropbox’s "Armeetingeddon" is pure workplace drama. IT just deleted everyone's recurring meetings overnight like a petty ex with access to your Google Calendar, and honestly, they were right for it. A moment of silence for the weekly sync that didn’t make it.
The “product design” framework is the core gimmick, and it works. Treating meetings like user-centered products is the kind of tech-world crossover that could get cringe fast, but Hinds keeps it grounded. It's not buzzword salad, it’s tactical, it’s actionable, and it tells you exactly why your meetings suck and how to fix them without having to read between the synergy lines.
That said, this book is still a workplace manual. The tone is calm, the ideas are clean, but don’t expect wild prose or laugh-out-loud sass. I’d have loved a little more bite, a little more “rage against the calendar” energy. It hits all the right notes, but sometimes I wanted a full musical number, you know? But as a guide for team leads, department heads, or literally anyone who's ever screamed internally at the phrase “quick alignment call,” this delivers. 4 stars.
And a big chaotic-thank-you-hug to Simon Element and NetGalley for the ARC. I never thought I’d call a book about meetings fun... but here we are, professionally unhinged and emotionally reorganized.
Your Best Meeting Ever is basically the Marie Kondo of workplace dysfunction. But instead of asking what sparks joy, it’s asking, “Why are you holding a thirty-minute meeting for something that could’ve been a six-line Slack thread, Greg?” And I love that. I want that needlepointed on a pillow and flung directly into the nearest conference room.
What makes this book sing is that it doesn’t just roast bad meetings, it autopsies them. Hinds breaks down every shade of meeting chaos, from the bloated advisory groups that multiplied like gremlins after midnight, to the dreaded “cost calculator” moment where you realize your quick check-in is bleeding the company of $700 in salaried time. (Yes, I winced. Yes, I did math I immediately regretted.)
Her tone isn’t exactly spicy, this is still a professional blueprint, not a rage-text from someone trapped in a calendar spiral, but the case studies slap. Dropbox’s "Armeetingeddon" is pure workplace drama. IT just deleted everyone's recurring meetings overnight like a petty ex with access to your Google Calendar, and honestly, they were right for it. A moment of silence for the weekly sync that didn’t make it.
The “product design” framework is the core gimmick, and it works. Treating meetings like user-centered products is the kind of tech-world crossover that could get cringe fast, but Hinds keeps it grounded. It's not buzzword salad, it’s tactical, it’s actionable, and it tells you exactly why your meetings suck and how to fix them without having to read between the synergy lines.
That said, this book is still a workplace manual. The tone is calm, the ideas are clean, but don’t expect wild prose or laugh-out-loud sass. I’d have loved a little more bite, a little more “rage against the calendar” energy. It hits all the right notes, but sometimes I wanted a full musical number, you know? But as a guide for team leads, department heads, or literally anyone who's ever screamed internally at the phrase “quick alignment call,” this delivers. 4 stars.
And a big chaotic-thank-you-hug to Simon Element and NetGalley for the ARC. I never thought I’d call a book about meetings fun... but here we are, professionally unhinged and emotionally reorganized.
February 17, 2026
I simply felt like this book was a too-long meeting that should have been an email. The premise of this book "meetings are bad" so eliminate them, might work in startups and tech industry, but is extremely difficult in other settings. I agree that there are better ways to organize them, and I like the idea of no-meeting days. Some other tidbits like the DRI, or directly responsible individual, is a fantastic idea. That's when there is a single, clearly named person assigned to an agenda item or action item who is ultimately accountable for the success of that task, ensuring it moves forward from discussion to completion.
February 17, 2026
I'm sure this is a great book for someone who's job is to structure large teams across multiple departments and locations. That's certainly who the book is geared toward based on the anecdotes that start each chapter.
However, as a leader of a small team I found remarkably little that I could take away from the book. Too much time was spent on eliminating meetings that could have been emails, with not enough time spent on how to design a well-structured meeting.
That being said, I did take away a couple of specific ideas - brainwriting vs. brainstorming, and the importance of a corporate manifesto. But I didn't need 240 pages to get those.
However, as a leader of a small team I found remarkably little that I could take away from the book. Too much time was spent on eliminating meetings that could have been emails, with not enough time spent on how to design a well-structured meeting.
That being said, I did take away a couple of specific ideas - brainwriting vs. brainstorming, and the importance of a corporate manifesto. But I didn't need 240 pages to get those.
February 6, 2026
This was such an engaging read. I didn't expect a book about meetings to be so interesting and yet still actionable. The accolades from Adam Grant, Reid Hoffman, and others are deserved. Your Best Meeting Ever changed the way I lead meetings and attend them. Everyone is a codesigner of better meetings.
February 11, 2026
Good Book, Basic princples to eliminate bad meeting, techniques to run effective meetings. This is must read for newly promoted managers and project managers.
February 18, 2026
Fantastic book; highly actionable. Changed how I run and attend meetings.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews