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Corporate types will tell you meetings are a necessary evil. Solo freelancers will tell you meetings are cancerous. Al Pittampalli will tell you that we have too many meetings and far too many bad meetings.

While technology has certainly helped reduce the amount of required, face-to-face interactions, there is no way for most people to avoid getting together with colleagues to discuss business decisions. Pittampalli acknowledges that in his new book Read This Before Our Next Meeting (free on Kindle for a week) and gives away a framework and rules for what he calls a modern meeting.

His seven principles go like this:

1. Meet only to support a decision that has already been made.
2. Move fast. End on schedule.
3. Limit the number of attendees.
4. Reject the unprepared.
5. Produce committed action plans.
6. Refuse to be informational. Read the memo, it’s mandatory.
7. Work with brainstorms, not against them.

Anyone who’s ever worked with others has certainly sat through a boring, wasteful meeting. Not only do they disrupt our ability to get things done, they erode the confidence of anyone to get anything done. Most successful people likely run a version of a modern meeting like Pittampalli mapped out, but few have actually put these tips to paper.

That’s where you come in. Think of the amazing productivity leaps we could all make if everyone agreed to make meetings less wasteful and a whole lot more bearable. No one is asking to eliminate facetime with each other, but rather stay productive instead of standing around watching one person talk.

Part of being a successful writer/rapper/developer/startup is the ability to maximize time. Eliminating wastefulness goes a long way to making a workday more bearable.

Could you imagine a life without boring meetings? A business day accentuated by quick huddles instead of interrupted by hour-long snoozefests?

You can’t create if you’re in a meeting. You can’t be more awesome if you’re in a meeting. But you can make meetings work for you.

(The author was given a review copy of the book and works with the Domino Project Street Team, but is under no obligation to give this book a good review. He just liked it and claims to want to attend more meetings now.)