Most meetings could/should be avoided. That said, sometimes when a few people need to sync and agree to validate a point or review something, it's quicker than endless async emails/Slack/whatever-collaboration-tool-you-use.

Adam 's list is nice, I'd just like to propose a subtle variant of the

• Schedule meetings back-to-back so that they don't slice up those precious blocks of time.

I hate when meeting go overtime. But I hate even more when our meeting is delayed because someone's meeting is overtime (and no other meeting room is available, so you end up waiting for the one you booked, or people you're waiting for are stuck in another meeting).

Whenever possible I try to book meeting when people:

• don't already have a meeting in the same day or half-day
• don't have some blocked timespan in their calendar just before

My rules of thumb (some overlap with Adam )

• Agenda is key to stay on focus, and to help people come prepared to the meeting
• As much as we can, we have a rule: meeting should only be scheduled in the morning (choose the half-day that best suits your team). The goal is to try to force full-focus half-days, even if the other half is interrupted with a meeting
• Try to reduce recurrent meeting to the bare minimum, and don't hesitate to cancel them when they're not relevant (e.g.: grooming meeting might be canceled if you're in the middle of large chunks of works and not enough stories are ready for grooming, and you could wait the next 2 weeks anyway
• Try to send invite at least 1 day ahead, not the same day than the meeting. I life to be able to plan my day, knowing when I'll be interrupted. Short-notice meeting are kind of double-disruptive.

Is it desirable to have no meetings at all?

Yes :3

I think meetings are important. Working together on a team means setting aside time to discuss things at a higher level than the day-to-day work. Things like project details, goals for the department/company, getting input from peers, etc, are all very important.

The problem arises when these meetings occur frequently enough that programmers don't get large blocks of uninterrupted time to do their work. There is a ramp up time and cognitive load required for programmers to even begin working, so, to suddenly be interrupted for yet another "pointless" meeting and forced to restart this process several times a day causes a drop in productivity and programmer happiness.

Here are a few tricks that can be tried outside of the obvious "have fewer meetings" suggestion:

• Schedule meetings back-to-back so that they don't slice up those precious blocks of time.
• Insist that one-off meetings be moved to existing meetings whenever possible and appropriate.
• Insist every meeting have an agenda (even just a simple one) or cancel it. Stick to the agenda so that you end on time or early.
• As an experiment, move a weekly meeting to once every other week. You'd be surprised.
• If the agenda for a meeting requires going around the room having people give a status update on their one project and then sitting quietly the rest of the time, try collecting status updates via a productivity tool such as Slack or Trello. Otherwise, you're wasting a bunch of people's time. If it's truly simpler to just meet, try doing the meeting as a stand-up so it doesn't drag out.
• Make sure the invitees really need to be there. Don't invite the whole team if only a few need to be there.