The meeting rhythm
Borrowed from Patrick Lencioni's Death by Meeting: four kinds of meetings, each with one job, so no single conversation has to carry everything. The season sets the direction; the month makes the big calls; the week keeps things moving; the day keeps you connected. If a topic doesn't fit any of them, ask why you're meeting.
| How often | What it looks like | Its one job |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | 2–5 minutes, standing up | Each person's top two things for today. Over coffee, in the group chat ... the form doesn't matter; the everyday-ness does. |
| Weekly team meeting | 30–60 min, same day every week, one person runs it | Start with a quick around-the-table: what's up this week, in two minutes each. No pre-written agenda ... build it on the spot from what people said and what the tracker shows. Unstick whoever's stuck. Done in about 45. |
| Monthly sit-down | 1–2 hours | One or two big topics only ... and decisions actually get made. Whoever brings the topic brings three options, because a menu produces a choice and a blank page produces a debate. |
| Season-end step-back | Half a day, somewhere else | Away from the daily noise. What's working, what isn't, and what the next 90-day version looks like (Part 5). |
The weekly tracker
The spreadsheet that came with this guide is deliberately simple: every first-30-days item and every promise made since, each with a name, a date, a time-or-dollars tag, and a status. The weekly meeting opens it, walks it, updates it, closes it. Two rules keep it honest:
- Done means done. Not "mostly." Not "waiting on one thing." An item that's waiting on something gets marked Blocked, plus a new line naming what it's waiting for and whose job that is.
- The finisher keeps the tracker. Give it to whoever has Tenacity on the genius map ... the person constitutionally incapable of letting things drop. This is the single best use of that map.
Six house rules
These are agreements about how you'll treat each other when the decisions get hard ... which matters double when the people you're building with are the people you'll eat Thanksgiving with. Adopt them out loud; post them where you meet.
The five questions for when you're stuck
For whoever's driving the work ... for the moment the plan runs into a decision it didn't see coming. Ask these five in order; you'll usually be unstuck by the third.
There's a print-ready version of these five questions in your Workshop Kit. The moment it earns its keep is exactly the moment nobody thinks to open a document.