In fall 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, on the day the San Francisco sky turned blood-red from wildfire smoke, we founded Miter. We started with a simple observation and a hypothesis. The observation: everybody hates meetings. That’s not rocket science, I know: it’s well-documented and near-universally recognized. In…

by Ashley Whillans (Miter’s behavioral science advisor), Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski. Originally published in Harvard Business Review. It’s no secret: most meetings are terrible. As a behavioral scientist and two founders of a startup devoted to improving meetings, that’s the easy part of our pitch. But fixing them? …

This week, Adobe acquired Figma for $20B. Now, it’s time for pundits to tell you what combination of business savvy, luck, unfair advantage, and/or evil machinations led to Figma’s success. Including me! Seriously: I’ve never worked for Figma. Or any of its competitors. But the analysis I’ve seen so far…

by Ashley Whillans, Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski Most people hate meetings: they feel like a waste of time. Only 17% of senior executives report that their meetings are productive. One critical reason is a lack of concrete and specific goals. …

by Ashley Whillans (Miter’s behavioral science advisor), Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski. Originally published in Harvard Business Review. Everyone hates meetings. Attending too many can be highly stressful and tiring, and both productivity and quality take a hit when employees tune out, become demotivated, and lose valuable heads-down work time. As such, it’s hardly a surprise that managers in one survey reported 83% of the meetings on their calendars were unproductive, or that US-based professionals rated meetings as the “number one office productivity killer.”

This was originally published in January 2021. I’ve made a few updates to reflect changes since then. By now, you’ve probably heard of Webflow — the flexible, no-code way to build your website. More and more startups are turning to Webflow instead of Wordpress, Drupal, Squarespace, or Wix. And the…

I have a confession to make: I’m the guy in the meeting who’s always saying, “Wait…are we all on the same page about why we’re having this meeting?” I know: it can be annoying. …

“Why do we have three separate meetings to go over the same spreadsheet?” said a colleague a few years back, mid-meeting. He had a point: we had three of the same weekly status meeting, whose purpose in each case was to read through that spreadsheet. Half the attendees were lost…

Design is best done collaboratively. That’s not a controversial idea, but it’s easy to lose sight of in the midst of a project. …