Send the agenda a day ahead

A meeting without an agenda is a meeting where the purpose gets decided in the first ten minutes, by whoever speaks first. Everyone knows this. Nobody writes agendas, because writing one is a small task at exactly the moment you are finishing something else.

Send it the night before, not the morning of

Timing is most of the value. An agenda that arrives an hour before gives nobody time to prepare or to say "this could be an email". Twenty-four hours does.

Draft from what the meeting is about

Every weekday at 4pm, look at tomorrow's meetings with more than two
attendees.

For each, draft an agenda to the attendees:
  the one decision or outcome this meeting is for
  two or three points to cover, from the invite and from our last
    conversation with these people
  what anyone needs to bring or read first

Keep it under 120 words. Do not include an ice-breaker, a round-table, or
"any other business".

If you cannot tell what the meeting is for from the invite and our history,
say so and ask me rather than inventing a purpose.

Hold every draft for my approval.

"Ask me rather than inventing a purpose" is the important half. An invented agenda is worse than none: it commits the room to a shape nobody chose, and people prepare for the wrong thing. A meeting whose purpose cannot be inferred is usually a meeting whose purpose has not been decided, and that is worth finding out the day before rather than during.

Approve, do not write

The point is that you spend thirty seconds approving rather than five minutes drafting. If you find yourself rewriting every agenda, the prompt is missing context about your meetings, not about your writing.

Watch what the agendas reveal

After a fortnight you will have a stack of meetings whose stated purpose is thin. That is not an agenda problem. It is a standing meeting that has outlived its reason, and the agenda is simply the first thing to notice.

What good looks like

Every meeting with more than two people arrives with a stated purpose, a day in advance, and occasionally somebody replies to say it can be handled without meeting.

That reply is the best outcome this playbook produces, and it only happens because the agenda went out early enough for someone to read it.