The Habit Nobody Puts on Their Calendar
I used to walk into meetings the same way most people do. I’d glance at the invite, maybe skim an email thread, and then just show up and figure it out live. Most of the time it worked fine. Some of the time it didn’t, and I never could tell which way it would go until I was already in the room.
The fix wasn’t a new system or a better calendar app. It was two minutes, alone, before I opened the door or clicked join.
What I Actually Do
Before any meeting that matters, sales call, hiring conversation, team check-in, I write down one sentence: what does a good outcome look like when this is over?
Not an agenda. Not a list of topics. One sentence about the result I want.
If it’s a sales call, the sentence might be: “They tell me exactly what’s stopping them from buying today.” If it’s a one-on-one with someone on my team, it might be: “She leaves knowing I noticed the work she did last week.” That’s it. I don’t write a script. I just name the target before I start aiming.
It sounds too small to matter. It isn’t.
Why This Works Better Than Preparation
Preparation is about information. You read the notes, you know the numbers, you remember the names. That part is necessary, but it doesn’t change how you show up in the moment. You can walk in fully informed and still let the conversation drift wherever the other person takes it.
Naming the outcome does something different. It gives you a filter while you’re talking. When the conversation wanders, and it always does, you have something to check against. Am I closer to that sentence or further from it? That question takes half a second to ask yourself mid-conversation, and it’s enough to pull you back on track without making the other person feel managed.
Without it, you’re just reacting. With it, you’re steering.
Where I See People Skip This
Sales is the easiest place to watch this go wrong. Someone gets on a call with a good pitch and a full deck, and they deliver all of it, and the call ends, and nobody can say what actually happened. The prospect was polite. The rep felt good about it. And there’s no next step, because nobody decided what the next step needed to be before the call started.
The same thing happens in hiring. A founder sits down with a candidate, asks the standard questions, gets answers that sound fine, and walks away unsure. Usually that’s because they never decided, going in, what they were actually trying to find out. “Is this person good” isn’t a sentence you can check a conversation against. “Can this person tell me about a time they made a decision with incomplete information” is.
The Part People Get Wrong
The instinct is to make this bigger than it needs to be. People hear “set an intention” and they write a paragraph, or they build a pre-call checklist with six items, or they turn it into a template they fill out for every meeting on the calendar. That defeats the point. If it takes more than two minutes, it won’t survive a busy week, and you’ll drop it by Thursday.
One sentence. Said out loud or written down, doesn’t matter which. The discipline isn’t in the format. It’s in doing it every time, even for the meetings that feel too small to need it. Those are usually the ones where it matters most, because those are the ones you’d otherwise walk into on autopilot.
What Changes Over Time
The individual meetings get better, but that’s not actually the biggest change. The bigger change is that I stopped leaving conversations unsure of what happened in them. I know, going in, what I’m checking for. I know, coming out, whether I got it.
That clarity compounds. A year of meetings where you knew what you wanted from each one looks very different from a year of meetings you just attended. Same number of hours. Different result, built two minutes at a time.