A meeting without a clear, specific purpose tends to drift, and drift is exactly what makes so many meetings feel like a waste of everyones time, so the fix starts before the meeting even begins, with a genuinely clear agenda, ideally shared with attendees in advance so people arrive already knowing what is actually going to be discussed and decided.
Keep the meeting to the smallest genuinely necessary group of people, since a larger group of attendees very often means less actually gets decided, not more, as discussion tends to expand and diffuse with each additional voice in the room. Before the meeting ends, assign clear owners and concrete deadlines for every action item that came up, since a meeting that produces no specific next steps, with no one clearly responsible for them, was largely wasted time regardless of how good the discussion itself felt in the moment. Keep the meeting genuinely time-boxed, and start and end it on time, since open-ended meetings reliably expand to fill whatever total time is made available to them, useful or not.
End every meeting with a brief, clear recap of exactly what was decided and who is doing what by when, and follow up with a short written summary afterward, since verbal agreements in a meeting are surprisingly easy to forget or misremember slightly differently by different people within a day or two without something written down to anchor them.
Example: A student leading a college clubs planning meeting shared a short, specific agenda in advance, kept the group intentionally small, and closed the meeting by clearly assigning each action item to a named person with a deadline, followed by a two-line written recap sent afterward, which meant the group actually got things done rather than needing a repeat meeting the following week to discuss the same points again.
One practical tip: Always close a meeting by assigning clear owners and deadlines to every action item, and send a short written recap afterward, since a meeting that produces no specific, assigned next steps was largely wasted time regardless of how productive the discussion itself felt.