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by 908B64B197 1790 days ago
Here's the one simple trick they don't want you to know about:

email the organizer, making sure to CC everyone, asking for the meeting's agenda.

1 comments

no, please don't do that. only asking for an agenda while cc'ing everyone is passive aggressive.

a more congenial approach would be to provide your understanding of the agenda, perhaps as a question, and then asking if there's more or another alternative: "it sounds like we're going to collectively make a decision on [x]. is there anything else on the agenda for this meeting?" even better if you do this one-to-one and, if needed, suggest the meeting invite be updated accordingly.

I think this depends on my relationship to the organizer. If they are my employee or mentee then sure. If the perceived agenda takes 5 seconds, maybe.

But it takes a few minutes to compose a draft agenda for someone else’s meeting. So I could spend an hour a day trying to figure out what blank meetings are supposed to do.

Asking for an agenda is quick, helps the organizer with a signal for what’s expected, and I can sustain that behavior.

I wouldn’t cc all the invites unless I think they are all also curious about the agenda and I just want to stave off an email storm asking the same question. (But then if I know that others will ask the same thing, I might just do nothing because someone else will ask)

> a more congenial approach would be to provide your understanding of the agenda

That shifts works to me.

If someone sends a meeting invite without an agenda, either I trust them and we already agreed this was worth spending time on or they should learn to write an agenda.