What led to BriefMe
Who
Bad meetings are a terrible waste of time. I've sat through thousands of hours of standups that drifted, reviews that ran long, and check-ins that checked nothing. I kept noticing the same pattern: the problem was never the people. It was that nobody was watching the clock, because watching the clock is an awkward duty to give to a person and the project lead is busy taking notes.
So I set out to give it to a timer instead.
Why
The mission is simple: meetings should be short and on point.
A good meeting maximizes what a group can decide together in the time it has.
A great one ends early.
The meetings I'm at war with are the other kind: the ones that could have been an email, stretched across an hour because an hour was what everyone's calendar offered. Every choice in BriefMe follows from that. Agendas come first, because a meeting without one has no way to end, no structure to lean on. The countdown is up on the wall for everyone to see, because a shared clock needs no single "enforcer".
How
BriefMe stays deliberately small: describe your meeting to your assistant or sketch it by hand, get a link, run the clock. No accounts required.
Have a meeting story, a gripe, or an idea? I read everything on the feedback board.