Read Time: 3 minutes.

I failed you.

For 48 weeks, 15,000 of you have gotten one of my playbooks. But last week, my draft simply wasn’t good enough. And I was faced with a choice:

As you can guess, I opted for door number 2.

But it wasn’t a decision I made lightly. You’ve trusted me with your time and attention. With everything I write, I try to respect that privilege.

I bet hard choices like this pop up for you every week. We set goals, deadlines, and constraints for ourselves because they help us focus on what matters and produce more.

But at what cost? And what if these goals and streaks no longer serve us?

Sometimes, we have to turn this bug into a feature. So this week, I’m dropping two editions. Well, it’s really two sides of the same problem.

Meetings.

So, without further ado, here’s part one of your double dose of the MGMT Playbook.

One of the executives I coach brought up a challenge that’s so common I was almost surprised when she surfaced it:

“I’m noticing that our meetings are deteriorating quickly. The energy is low. I’m learning there are a lot of side conversations in chat. These are expensive. We have to do better.”

So I asked our community of 155,000 leaders to describe the best meetings they’ve ever attended or led.

The one word that kept coming up?

Cancelled.

How could it be that we spend so much time doing something that is almost universally despised? Can we not shoot higher than “tolerable”? Can we elevate time spent with our colleagues above “necessary evil’?

I hope so. And I will make my pitch on How in Part 2 later this week.

But I don’t want to look past this unmistakable signal.

Why are our favorite meetings canceled?

And how can we cancel more of them?

Let’s run an experiment:

Cancel your weekly staff meeting today.

Let me guess how many people complained.

Zero.

And honestly, I bet several quietly rejoice. Maybe even you.

Part of it is that we’re massively overscheduled. And getting an unexpected hour of our day back is a real gift. It might mean the difference between tucking your kids in tonight and just missing them. Again.

The other reason is most meetings are mediocre.

But instead of doing the hard work of building a high-velocity operating model, we settle for safe. We do what we’ve always done. We paper over indecision and loose thinking with our team’s time and attention.

It’s a catch-22. We can’t have good meetings without the capacity to make them great. We don’t have the capacity to make them great because we’re in them all damn day.

So let’s create the space.

Here are three different ways I’ve pulled this off. None easy. All effective.

Go into your calendar. Space out the cadence 2x what it is today. You just got back 50% of your time. Now use some of that to make them 2x as good.

“But most of the meetings aren’t my meetings. I can’t cancel them.”

Try this…