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? Not…

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. Research suggests that an explicit goal can help teams…

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. But, it’s important — so important, in fact, that it’s central to what we’re building here…

“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…