[gruseom]

If you're having the meetings for the sake of having a weekly meeting (or, what amounts to the same thing, for a managerial reason like "status updates") then I'm not surprised it's dull. People's spirits are weighed down by the artificiality of that. It's a drag to drop what you're doing, which presumably is interesting, and go sit around doing something boring. Surely that's the last thing you ought to be doing in a startup.

To get out of the trap, apply the converse. The same people who groan at the thought of enduring an arbitrary meeting will come to life when working together on something real. Therefore, figure out how to make your meetings real work on something that matters. Failing that, ask the team to figure out a way to provide the value of the meeting without needing to have a meeting.

Here's my criterion. I ask myself whether what's going on is making me (and others) feel more or less alive. If it's the latter, I try to understand why. If necessary, I'll speak up and say frankly that what we're doing feels like a drag and change the subject to what we can do about it.

Basically, if it doesn't feel fun, something's wrong. Fun is the canary in the coal mine: if it goes, everything else is going too, just more slowly. So it really pays to give attention to this. I'm surprised more people don't figure that out. (Incidentally, by "fun" I don't mean anything set up to be fun, like those asinine team-building outings... those things aren't fun, they're a crate of suckage with a label that says "fun" stuck on it. What I'm talking about is spontaneous enjoyment of creative work and meaningful interaction with others.)