I had to remember how to behave in meetings: first rule, don't say everything that comes to mind | Zoe Williams

So after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, I'm at an in-person meeting that happened fairly regularly before the pandemic, sharing a theory about a minister who I won't name except that she has the nickname "leaky". By the way, I got this notion on Twitter, and it involved a lot of premeditated twists, acts disguised as accidents that were actually carefully plotted, all part of a long, complex, gestalt game. I have made no attempt to verify this theory. As far as I'm concerned, it was the "pull the breeze" phase of the meeting, where you just say whatever pops into your head, like the first 20 minutes in a pub, before you decide who you want to bitch . .

There is no such phase, reader: as I was quickly reminded, a meeting is not the same as a pub. "It's pretty well established that this was all just an accident," someone politely pointed out. “It sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory,” someone else said. And certainly. Funny things often sound like conspiracy theories. First forgotten rule of dating: it's not supposed to be fun.

I really idealized face-to-face during the endless months of Zooms. I thought a lot about the chemistry in the piece, how the physical unity generated a wordless creativity that may or may not appear in the end in the words – the warmth, the suspense, the magic of the encounter. God knows where I was getting these ideas from – I may not have been invited to many meetings even before the pandemic. In reality, the only benefit of being all in the same room is that it allows for the quiet, careful physical cues that tell boring people they're boring; they had no way of knowing it from a screen, and some of them still talk to this day.

To speak only of me, some basic skills have been lost. Before you even get to the meeting, someone has to decide what it's all about. I have now had a large number of breakout meetings that neither of us had a clue about, and these were indistinguishable from golf, right down to the lengths and time spent watching something from afar. To establish what this is all about, it is useful to take up an axiom from the American left: “Never have a meeting whose only result is another meeting. If you can think of actions that could likely come out of your meeting, that might hold a clue as to what it's really about. This is particularly useful if the meeting is political rather than professional: people who freely devote their time to achieving a dream are more likely than average to have no idea what an action would look like.

"Presiding" is not the same as "writing what people say"; if you confuse them, someone will likely take your crown of presidency away from you and thank God for it. If you have a meeting that not everyone was in and you write things down, don't just pass it on to everyone who wasn't there. Yeah, I also wondered why not, and I got the explanation, "Partly because we're not the governing board of a small charity, we're a radical utopian cell, but mostly because you were drunk at the end and what you did we all look drunk. Don't drink at the meeting unless your meeting is in Downing Street, where you'll otherwise stand out.

If your meeting is hybrid, make sure there's Jammie Dodgers for the in-person element, as this will bring all remote attendees back into the room. These events live or die depending on whether or not someone wants to be there, and if people are there, that's a really good start. Begin each meeting with a tightly harmonized rendition of The Room Where It Happens, from the musical Hamilton, as it will make everyone feel like something could happen. If in your account of the reunion later it sounds a lot like an anxiety dream, you did it wrong.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist