A Chief of Staff Perspective on Meetings
Insights from a short, targeted peer-to-peer survey
If anyone has earned the right to be cynical about meetings, it’s Chiefs of Staff.
They sit at the intersection of exec calendars, strategic priorities, and operational entropy. They see the true cost of every 60-minute “quick sync” that drags leaders into a Zoom room with no clear purpose.
So I asked a group of Chiefs of Staff two simple questions:
- “Finish the sentence: Meetings are…”
- “What’s your #1 meeting hack?”
The responses were short, sharp, and surprisingly aligned — and they paint a clear picture of how operators think.
(Note: At Kairos, we work closely with Chiefs of Staff as thought partners. Their feedback is often the birthplace of product decisions and workflow design. Many of the patterns below directly shaped features we’ve co-built with the Kairos Advisor Network. If you’re interested in joining, learn more here.)
How Chiefs of Staff describe meetings
Nobody described meetings as “a great way to connect.” That’s not the tone. That’s not the job.
Meetings are a means to an end. Done right, they drive progress and business outcomes.
Here is the common thread across their answers.
- Meetings work when the organizer shares context and expected outcomes.
- Meetings fail when people show up without preparation.
- Meetings help when decisions require multiple perspectives in real time.
- Meetings waste time when they cover updates or information that could live in a document.
- Meetings are expensive.
- Meetings can be powerful when used with intent.
There’s a worldview baked in:
Meetings are high-cost tools that only work when they’re intentional.
Everything else is calendar theater.
This mindset is exactly why so many Chiefs of Staff end up building elaborate systems: templates, pre-read workflows, DACI frameworks, decision docs, Slack nudges, Notion databases, bespoke rituals, etc.
The #1 meeting hacks (from people who live in calendars)
When asked for their single best meeting hack, you’d expect a bunch of unrelated tips.
That’s not what happened.
The answers converged around a small set of practices that, honestly, most organizations just don’t do consistently.
If you want to see the full set of meeting practices that real teams rely on, you can find a comprehensive list here.
1. Start with purpose and outcomes
Almost every answer referenced clarity of objective:
- “Always have a clear objective for the meeting, and a reason why this can’t be an email or Slack thread instead.”
- “Effective with intended outcome and clear agenda.”
- “Agreeing on the outcomes we're here for.”
The pattern:
A meeting should have a job to be done. You should be able to finish the sentence:
“At the end of this meeting, we will have… [decision / alignment / plan / unblock].”
If you can’t, you don’t have a meeting—you have a time slot with people in it.
2. Agenda and pre-reads are non-negotiable
An “agenda” isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s part of the contract for using people’s time.
Hacks included:
- “Always have an agenda, allow time for dialogue…”
- “Pre-meeting context share-out (purpose, intended outcomes, and background).”
- “Prepare memos beforehand with the expectation that attendees have read it.”
One respondent put it bluntly:
“Don’t present anything during a meeting. Share upfront so people can come prepared, and you can make concrete decisions.”
The CoS mindset: Meetings are for discussion, not for broadcasting information that could have been read asynchronously.
3. Be ruthless about who’s invited
You can feel the quiet rage of Chiefs of Staff who’ve watched 10-person meetings wander in circles.
One hack:
“Including only parties that have something to actively contribute to the discussion.”
If someone is there “for awareness,” that’s usually a sign the meeting structure is broken. Awareness should come from notes, summaries, or shared docs—not attendance.
4. Do real prep before the meeting
“Alignment before the meeting” came up explicitly.
Chiefs of Staff don’t rely on the meeting itself to surface all risks, objections, or politics. The hard work happens before:
- 1:1s with key stakeholders
- Clarifying tradeoffs
- Cleaning up background context
By the time everyone’s in the room, the group can move quickly because the messy work has already been done.
5. End with decisions, owners, and next steps
Several respondents explicitly mentioned DACI or similar frameworks—ways to force clarity on who owns what.
One example:
“Filling out a DACI (accountability framework) for every single decision before we leave, even if it feels too tactical and mundane.”
The key ideas:
- Decisions are documented.
- Actions have owners and deadlines.
- The follow-up mechanism is clear (where updates live, when progress will be checked).
Otherwise, you’re just exporting ambiguity into the rest of the week.
6. Default to async; meetings must earn their existence
Chiefs of Staff are not shy about canceling.
- “Don’t meet just to meet.”
- “If you don’t have that clear objective to meet—cancel it until you do.”
Email, Slack, collaborative docs, and project tools are the first line. Meetings are what you use when those channels aren’t enough.
One respondent went a step further:
“Putting a price tag on the meeting based on the salary of the people in the room.”
Once you attach a dollar amount to a recurring calendar block, it becomes much easier to kill it.
Why these patterns matter
CoS leaders spend an unreasonable amount of time protecting the calendar from misuse. They build templates, create pre-read rituals, send nudges, chase owners and reorganize entire meeting structures. They often run this system manually because most tools focus on communication rather than preparation, clarity or follow through.
This is the same reason we work directly with Chiefs of Staff while building Kairos. They surface problems first and they feel the consequences fastest. Kairos is not a productivity tool; We don’t build features for “saving two clicks” or adding UI doodads. We co-build the workflows that turn meetings into progress:
- World-class agendas + meeting outcomes in <7s via embedded AI in your calendar, trained on decades of scientific research from the world’s leading expert on meetings (Never trained on your data).
- Meeting notes pulled via seamless APIs, not passive aggressive meeting bots.
- Calendar audits on demand that align your time against your priorities, not trying to look busy.
Many of the strongest meeting rituals inside companies today started as some CoS’s spreadsheet, doc template, or color-coded Notion. Kairos just scales those rituals.
If you’re a leader, this is the bar
If you lead a team and your meetings don’t look like this, your Chiefs of Staff are silently compensating for the chaos.
They’re doing the hidden work:
- Clarifying objectives that never made it into the invite.
- Herding stakeholders who haven’t read the doc.
- Cleaning up decisions that weren’t documented.
- Protecting the calendar from recurring meetings that no longer have a purpose.
The survey results are a useful gut check:
If you couldn’t defend the cost of the meeting in cash terms, and you couldn’t write down the outcome in a single sentence, you probably shouldn’t hold it.
If you’d like to contribute to further studies and findings, please reach out to khissa@meetkairos.com.The more we surface the operator perspective, the fewer hours we all waste in calendar theater.
