Before scheduling, ensure a meeting's purpose is to Decide, Debate, Discuss, or Develop (4Ds). Then, confirm the topic is either Complex, Emotionally intense, or a One-way door decision (CEO). This rigorous filter eliminates status updates and other low-value synchronous gatherings from calendars.

Speed is a mindset that compounds efficiency. Responding to an email in one minute requires just two words. A day's delay demands a paragraph, and a week necessitates a full page. Acting with speed drastically reduces the cumulative effort required for communication and tasks.

Most meetings are a failure of asynchronous communication, indicating information wasn't shared effectively beforehand. Limit meetings to broadcasting decisions or debating contentious topics where disagreement is productive, not for simple context sharing.

To focus on high-impact, ambiguous problems, top executives must be militant about protecting their calendars. Xero's CPO blocks one full day per week and two hours daily for deep thinking. A key tactic is to be intentionally unresponsive to tactical channels like email and Slack to discourage interruptions.

Meetings are a poor form of communication that create calendar clutter and force rushed decisions. Defaulting to asynchronous tools like Loom videos and email allows for better, more considered responses, protects time for deep work, and increases overall iteration speed and decision quality.

Elon Musk proposed running Tesla on three-sentence emails to optimize for a CEO's time. This forces extreme clarity, minimizes information absorption time, and makes team members more valuable by sharpening their own thinking before communicating.

To maintain velocity, Clay avoids scheduled executive team meetings, which can become a bottleneck. Instead, leadership operates on an "open space" policy where issues are raised and resolved as they happen. This "just-in-time" approach prevents problems from being delayed until a formal meeting slot.

To avoid becoming a bottleneck, create a decision framework with tiered spending authority (e.g., $50 for any employee, $500 for managers). This pushes problem-solving down to the people with the most context, freeing up the CEO and speeding up operations.

To combat passive "problem admiration" in meetings, Dimon forces accountability by asking team members what they would do if they were in charge. This tactic pushes people beyond analysis and into a concrete, decision-making mindset, ensuring meetings lead to clear actions rather than endless discussion.