The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email (And the Fifty Others That Should Not Have Existed)

The average professional spends roughly 23 hours per week in meetings. That number has been climbing for years. Pre-pandemic, it was around 18 hours. Remote work normalized video calls, and video calls normalized back-to-back scheduling. The calendar became a grid of 30-minute blocks, each one a context switch, each one a disruption of the focused work that meetings were supposedly enabling. The meeting was supposed to make us more aligned. Instead, it made us more busy, and busy is not the same as productive.

But the real question is not how many hours we spend in meetings. The real question is how many of those meetings should have existed at all. The honest answer, based on every survey of employee sentiment ever conducted, is that roughly half of all meetings are considered a complete waste of time by the people attending them. That is not a rounding error. That is an epidemic of organizational theatre.

The structure of the bad meeting is almost always the same. Someone calls a meeting without a clear agenda. People show up, some prepared, most not. The first five minutes are spent waiting for latecomers. The next ten minutes are spent on status updates that could have been read in two minutes. Someone goes on a tangent. Someone else brings up a topic that should be a separate conversation. Decisions are deferred because not everyone with authority is present. Action items are captured vaguely. A follow-up meeting is scheduled to discuss the things that were not discussed in this meeting. The entire exercise exists in a state of recursive self-justification. We meet because we met before, and we will meet again because we just met.

The bad meeting is not a failure of communication. It is a failure of courage. The person who called the meeting did not have the courage to send a decision via email. The attendees did not have the courage to decline. The senior person who dominated the conversation did not have the courage to listen. The junior person who had the key insight did not have the courage to interrupt. The organization has collectively created a culture where being seen in meetings is valued more than the output of meetings.

The data confirms what everyone suspects. A study by Bain & Company found that increasing the amount of time managers spend in meetings correlates with a decrease in organizational productivity. More meetings do not produce better outcomes. They produce worse outcomes, consumed more time, and lower morale. Yet the meeting count continues to rise because meetings serve a function that has nothing to do with productivity. They serve the function of visibility. A person who is in meetings is a person who appears busy, appears connected, appears important. A person who is doing focused work is invisible. In most organizations, invisibility is a career risk. So people choose the meeting.

The solution is not a meeting ban. It is a meeting discipline. Before anyone schedules a meeting, they should answer five questions. What decision requires this meeting? Who must be present to make that decision? Can this decision be made asynchronously? What will happen if we do not meet? How will we measure whether this meeting was worth the time it consumed? These questions filter out most meetings. What remains is a much smaller set of meetings that are shorter, more focused, and more likely to produce outcomes.

The individual cost of meetings is harder to measure but more painful. Every hour in a useless meeting is an hour you cannot spend on the work that matters to you. It is an hour of your life that you will never get back. It is an hour that reinforces the message that your time belongs to the organization, not to you. The resentment this creates is quiet but cumulative. It is one of the reasons good people leave otherwise good jobs. They do not leave because of the work. They leave because the work was buried under meetings about the work.

Schedule your next meeting. Then ask yourself if you would attend it if you had the choice. If the answer is no, cancel it. Your colleagues will thank you. They may not say it. But they will thank you.