Justify My Meeting

🕵️ Is a meeting justified?

Have a meeting coming up? Paste the invite or describe what happens. Justify My Meeting looks at the goal of the meeting and whether having everyone there at the same time is the best use of everyone’s time. Then it tells you whether to keep it, shorten it, fix it, or replace it with something better.

Overview

A meeting earns its place when the goal genuinely needs people thinking together in real time — a decision that needs the disagreement in the room, a conversation that would go wrong in writing, work that has to be built jointly. Justify My Meeting starts from the goal you describe, asks what synchronous time actually adds to it, and returns one of four answers: keep it, shorten it, fix it, or replace it with something asynchronous. It says which parts of its reasoning are inference rather than fact, and what it would need to know to say more.

How to use it

1. Judge a Meeting: paste the invite or describe what happens, add duration and headcount if you know them, and get the verdict with its reasoning
2. Zombie Check: for a recurring meeting — what it was set up for versus what it does now, and what to change
3. Week Audit: list the meetings in your week and see which ones earn their time
4. Rescue This Meeting: you are in one right now and it is going nowhere — get words you can say out loud
5. After a FIX IT verdict, build the agenda. After SHORTEN IT or MAKE IT ASYNC, draft the message.

Example

Scenario: A standing 60-minute engineering all-hands with 22 attendees. The agenda is 'status updates from each team lead' — no prep, no decisions, everyone reports out what they did last week.

What you do: Paste the invite, set duration to 1 hour and attendees to 22.

Result: Verdict: MAKE IT ASYNC. The reasoning names what synchronous time is buying here — nothing a written update would not — and what would change the verdict, such as a decision that needs the disagreement in the room. The time footprint is computed from your own numbers: 22 × 1h = 22 person-hours. A better way: a written update thread with a short live slot kept only for what needs discussion. Then it drafts the message, which proposes rather than announces, because you may not have the authority to change someone else's meeting.

Tips

• Describe what actually happens, not what the invite claims — that is where the answer usually lives
• Duration and headcount are optional, but supplying them is what makes the time footprint real rather than guessed
• 'Anything else that matters?' is where context belongs — who is not invited, what was already decided, who is not speaking to whom
• A NOT ENOUGH TO TELL verdict is a real answer: it tells you what is missing rather than guessing
• Some meetings genuinely earn their hour. A tool that never says 'keep it' would not be worth consulting.

Common pitfalls

• It reads only what you supply — it cannot see the politics, the history, or the person who will take it personally
• It never tells you that you are allowed to skip. It helps you propose a change, which is a different thing
• In a meeting-heavy culture the verdict may be right and still not worth acting on this week