You need to do well at your meetings themselves, of course. But doing a good job with your meetings starts before the meeting. It starts when you send the calendar invite.

Maybe you have an executive assistant, you lucky duck. More likely, you schedule your own meetings. I think there was a time that services like Calendly and Fantastical were looked down upon, but now I believe busy humans understand that tools to help us schedule meetings more efficiently are a gift and we should embrace them.

But here’s the thing: How you name meetings matters.

If I’m sending the invite, and my meeting is with Marie, I’m going to name the meeting “Lex / Marie sync” or “Lex Friedman Consulting + Marie’s Business Name” or something along those lines. Listing my name first doesn’t suggest to Marie that I think I’m more important than she is; it’s helpful: It means even if her calendar truncates things a bit in whatever view she’s using, she can see the name of the person coming up on her calendar. That’s a tiny gift.

The most annoying meetings on my calendar are the ones that are labeled things like “Call with Lex” or “Meeting with Lex” or just simply “Lex.”

I get meeting invitations like that every single week. Those are helpful to the inviter, but not to the invited.

Include both names in your meeting title, so that it’s clear for everyone. And if you're including extra details in the invitation notes, say so explicitly in an email, because many people don’t see those notes.

And don’t ever schedule someone for more than 30 minutes unless you’ve asked first. When we agree on a time and you then send me a 45-minute invite, I’m miffed. I quite probably can’t make the extra 15 minutes, because of how crazy my calendar gets.

Good calendar etiquette doesn’t take a lot of time. But it can save a lot of it! And earns tons of goodwill.