Meetings are so notorious for draining productivity that historic sabotage manuals listed them as a deliberate tactic. The uncomfortable reality is that modern teams still fall into the same traps unintentionally. Too many attendees, fuzzy objectives, and decisions that never quite stick. These failures compound into feedback loops: too many meetings leave no time to prepare, meetings run long, people multitask, and effectiveness drops even further. By the time everyone joins the call, the outcome is often already determined.

This talk focuses on how to break those loops before a meeting begins. Using lessons pulled straight from the sabotage playbook, we will contrast common meeting anti-patterns with practical countermeasures. This includes choosing the right type of meeting, deciding who actually needs to attend and who does not, designing agendas that force clarity, shaping environment and logistics for focus, and closing with explicit decisions and action items. Attendees will leave with reusable heuristics, agenda patterns, and follow-up structures they can apply immediately to design meetings that respect time and produce outcomes. Or, to misquote Arleen Lorrance, be the meeting you want to see happen.

This talk has been given at KCDC 2023 and CodeMash 2026