In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
The daily standup was designed to be fifteen minutes. It was designed to be standing, which applied physical pressure to keep it short. It was designed to answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking me. At some point in its evolution — usually around month two of any team that is using it — it became thirty minutes and seated, acquired a fourth agenda item that is not one of the three questions, began to be used as a venue for discussions that belong elsewhere, and is now functionally a meeting about the meeting it was supposed to replace. The email alternative is a shared async update tool. The reason this is not used is that it requires people to write, which is more effortful than speaking, and it does not produce the ritual of togetherness that the standup has become, which is doing more work than the standup’s stated purpose.
The Meeting to Prepare for the Meeting
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
The alignment meeting is called because two teams have different understandings of a decision or a process, and the discrepancy needs to be resolved. This is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the common outcome: sixty minutes of discussion produces no documented decision, no owner, and no follow-up action, meaning the misalignment persists and a second alignment meeting will be necessary within a fortnight. The email alternative here is a decision document — a one-page write-up of the proposed resolution with a comment period — which forces the organiser to articulate the decision clearly before the conversation happens and produces a written record. Amazon’s famous writing culture does exactly this. It is more effective than the meeting. It is also harder to prepare and requires the organiser to commit to a specific position rather than letting the room produce one through discussion, which is why it is rarely adopted.
The Recurring Standup That Has Become a Sitdown
The daily standup was designed to be fifteen minutes. It was designed to be standing, which applied physical pressure to keep it short. It was designed to answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking me. At some point in its evolution — usually around month two of any team that is using it — it became thirty minutes and seated, acquired a fourth agenda item that is not one of the three questions, began to be used as a venue for discussions that belong elsewhere, and is now functionally a meeting about the meeting it was supposed to replace. The email alternative is a shared async update tool. The reason this is not used is that it requires people to write, which is more effortful than speaking, and it does not produce the ritual of togetherness that the standup has become, which is doing more work than the standup’s stated purpose.
The Meeting to Prepare for the Meeting
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
Seven people attend. Each reports what they are working on. Nobody has read anyone else’s update in advance. The updates are therefore delivered verbally, taking seven times longer than reading them would have, with the added texture of hedging language and the time cost of transitions between speakers. The manager nods. The meeting ends. Nothing has changed except that forty minutes of collective productivity have been exchanged for information that could have been a shared document updated weekly. Evidence for the email alternative: strong. Probability it becomes an email: low, because the status update meeting makes the manager feel informed in real time, which is different from being informed and which the document cannot replicate.
The Alignment Meeting
The alignment meeting is called because two teams have different understandings of a decision or a process, and the discrepancy needs to be resolved. This is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the common outcome: sixty minutes of discussion produces no documented decision, no owner, and no follow-up action, meaning the misalignment persists and a second alignment meeting will be necessary within a fortnight. The email alternative here is a decision document — a one-page write-up of the proposed resolution with a comment period — which forces the organiser to articulate the decision clearly before the conversation happens and produces a written record. Amazon’s famous writing culture does exactly this. It is more effective than the meeting. It is also harder to prepare and requires the organiser to commit to a specific position rather than letting the room produce one through discussion, which is why it is rarely adopted.
The Recurring Standup That Has Become a Sitdown
The daily standup was designed to be fifteen minutes. It was designed to be standing, which applied physical pressure to keep it short. It was designed to answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking me. At some point in its evolution — usually around month two of any team that is using it — it became thirty minutes and seated, acquired a fourth agenda item that is not one of the three questions, began to be used as a venue for discussions that belong elsewhere, and is now functionally a meeting about the meeting it was supposed to replace. The email alternative is a shared async update tool. The reason this is not used is that it requires people to write, which is more effortful than speaking, and it does not produce the ritual of togetherness that the standup has become, which is doing more work than the standup’s stated purpose.
The Meeting to Prepare for the Meeting
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
Not all meetings are created equal in their emailability. The taxonomy of meeting types and their honest assessment follows.
The Status Update Meeting
Seven people attend. Each reports what they are working on. Nobody has read anyone else’s update in advance. The updates are therefore delivered verbally, taking seven times longer than reading them would have, with the added texture of hedging language and the time cost of transitions between speakers. The manager nods. The meeting ends. Nothing has changed except that forty minutes of collective productivity have been exchanged for information that could have been a shared document updated weekly. Evidence for the email alternative: strong. Probability it becomes an email: low, because the status update meeting makes the manager feel informed in real time, which is different from being informed and which the document cannot replicate.
The Alignment Meeting
The alignment meeting is called because two teams have different understandings of a decision or a process, and the discrepancy needs to be resolved. This is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the common outcome: sixty minutes of discussion produces no documented decision, no owner, and no follow-up action, meaning the misalignment persists and a second alignment meeting will be necessary within a fortnight. The email alternative here is a decision document — a one-page write-up of the proposed resolution with a comment period — which forces the organiser to articulate the decision clearly before the conversation happens and produces a written record. Amazon’s famous writing culture does exactly this. It is more effective than the meeting. It is also harder to prepare and requires the organiser to commit to a specific position rather than letting the room produce one through discussion, which is why it is rarely adopted.
The Recurring Standup That Has Become a Sitdown
The daily standup was designed to be fifteen minutes. It was designed to be standing, which applied physical pressure to keep it short. It was designed to answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking me. At some point in its evolution — usually around month two of any team that is using it — it became thirty minutes and seated, acquired a fourth agenda item that is not one of the three questions, began to be used as a venue for discussions that belong elsewhere, and is now functionally a meeting about the meeting it was supposed to replace. The email alternative is a shared async update tool. The reason this is not used is that it requires people to write, which is more effortful than speaking, and it does not produce the ritual of togetherness that the standup has become, which is doing more work than the standup’s stated purpose.
The Meeting to Prepare for the Meeting
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
The meeting is not an accident of poor planning, although poor planning produces many meetings. The meeting is an organisational organism with its own ecology, its own survival mechanisms, and its own evolutionary pressures that operate independently of whether the meeting produces any outcome. Meetings persist not because they are always useful — research from Harvard Business Review and Microsoft’s Work Trend Index consistently finds that the majority of meeting time is considered unproductive by the people in it — but because they serve functions that emails cannot: they signal activity, they produce the feeling of coordination, they allow managers to observe their teams, they give people a defined period in which they are unambiguously working, and they create a rhythm of togetherness that many organisations mistake for the work of collaboration rather than the simulation of it.
This is the meeting’s core proposition, and it is worth stating clearly: the meeting is as much a social and political technology as an informational one. The information exchanged in most meetings could, with reasonable confidence, have been an email. The social signals conveyed in the meeting — who speaks, who defers, who is visibly present, who frames the agenda — cannot be an email. The meeting is where the informal power structure of the organisation is performed and maintained, which is why the people with the most power in organisations tend to call the most meetings and attend the fewest.
A Taxonomy of the Meetings That Should Have Been Emails
Not all meetings are created equal in their emailability. The taxonomy of meeting types and their honest assessment follows.
The Status Update Meeting
Seven people attend. Each reports what they are working on. Nobody has read anyone else’s update in advance. The updates are therefore delivered verbally, taking seven times longer than reading them would have, with the added texture of hedging language and the time cost of transitions between speakers. The manager nods. The meeting ends. Nothing has changed except that forty minutes of collective productivity have been exchanged for information that could have been a shared document updated weekly. Evidence for the email alternative: strong. Probability it becomes an email: low, because the status update meeting makes the manager feel informed in real time, which is different from being informed and which the document cannot replicate.
The Alignment Meeting
The alignment meeting is called because two teams have different understandings of a decision or a process, and the discrepancy needs to be resolved. This is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the common outcome: sixty minutes of discussion produces no documented decision, no owner, and no follow-up action, meaning the misalignment persists and a second alignment meeting will be necessary within a fortnight. The email alternative here is a decision document — a one-page write-up of the proposed resolution with a comment period — which forces the organiser to articulate the decision clearly before the conversation happens and produces a written record. Amazon’s famous writing culture does exactly this. It is more effective than the meeting. It is also harder to prepare and requires the organiser to commit to a specific position rather than letting the room produce one through discussion, which is why it is rarely adopted.
The Recurring Standup That Has Become a Sitdown
The daily standup was designed to be fifteen minutes. It was designed to be standing, which applied physical pressure to keep it short. It was designed to answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking me. At some point in its evolution — usually around month two of any team that is using it — it became thirty minutes and seated, acquired a fourth agenda item that is not one of the three questions, began to be used as a venue for discussions that belong elsewhere, and is now functionally a meeting about the meeting it was supposed to replace. The email alternative is a shared async update tool. The reason this is not used is that it requires people to write, which is more effortful than speaking, and it does not produce the ritual of togetherness that the standup has become, which is doing more work than the standup’s stated purpose.
The Meeting to Prepare for the Meeting
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
The meeting is not an accident of poor planning, although poor planning produces many meetings. The meeting is an organisational organism with its own ecology, its own survival mechanisms, and its own evolutionary pressures that operate independently of whether the meeting produces any outcome. Meetings persist not because they are always useful — research from Harvard Business Review and Microsoft’s Work Trend Index consistently finds that the majority of meeting time is considered unproductive by the people in it — but because they serve functions that emails cannot: they signal activity, they produce the feeling of coordination, they allow managers to observe their teams, they give people a defined period in which they are unambiguously working, and they create a rhythm of togetherness that many organisations mistake for the work of collaboration rather than the simulation of it.
This is the meeting’s core proposition, and it is worth stating clearly: the meeting is as much a social and political technology as an informational one. The information exchanged in most meetings could, with reasonable confidence, have been an email. The social signals conveyed in the meeting — who speaks, who defers, who is visibly present, who frames the agenda — cannot be an email. The meeting is where the informal power structure of the organisation is performed and maintained, which is why the people with the most power in organisations tend to call the most meetings and attend the fewest.
A Taxonomy of the Meetings That Should Have Been Emails
Not all meetings are created equal in their emailability. The taxonomy of meeting types and their honest assessment follows.
The Status Update Meeting
Seven people attend. Each reports what they are working on. Nobody has read anyone else’s update in advance. The updates are therefore delivered verbally, taking seven times longer than reading them would have, with the added texture of hedging language and the time cost of transitions between speakers. The manager nods. The meeting ends. Nothing has changed except that forty minutes of collective productivity have been exchanged for information that could have been a shared document updated weekly. Evidence for the email alternative: strong. Probability it becomes an email: low, because the status update meeting makes the manager feel informed in real time, which is different from being informed and which the document cannot replicate.
The Alignment Meeting
The alignment meeting is called because two teams have different understandings of a decision or a process, and the discrepancy needs to be resolved. This is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the common outcome: sixty minutes of discussion produces no documented decision, no owner, and no follow-up action, meaning the misalignment persists and a second alignment meeting will be necessary within a fortnight. The email alternative here is a decision document — a one-page write-up of the proposed resolution with a comment period — which forces the organiser to articulate the decision clearly before the conversation happens and produces a written record. Amazon’s famous writing culture does exactly this. It is more effective than the meeting. It is also harder to prepare and requires the organiser to commit to a specific position rather than letting the room produce one through discussion, which is why it is rarely adopted.
The Recurring Standup That Has Become a Sitdown
The daily standup was designed to be fifteen minutes. It was designed to be standing, which applied physical pressure to keep it short. It was designed to answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking me. At some point in its evolution — usually around month two of any team that is using it — it became thirty minutes and seated, acquired a fourth agenda item that is not one of the three questions, began to be used as a venue for discussions that belong elsewhere, and is now functionally a meeting about the meeting it was supposed to replace. The email alternative is a shared async update tool. The reason this is not used is that it requires people to write, which is more effortful than speaking, and it does not produce the ritual of togetherness that the standup has become, which is doing more work than the standup’s stated purpose.
The Meeting to Prepare for the Meeting
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.
You are in a meeting. You have been in this meeting for forty-three minutes. The stated purpose of the meeting — as described in the calendar invite, which contained no agenda but the confident promise of “a quick sync to align on next steps” — remains elusive, not because the meeting is complex but because approximately thirty-seven of its forty-three minutes have been occupied with content that was either already in the email thread everyone was supposed to read before joining, or content that could have been addressed in a reply to that email thread, or content that someone has just suggested scheduling a separate meeting to address more thoroughly. The meeting is alive. The meeting is thriving. The meeting has no intention of becoming the email it was born to be. This article is a forensic examination of why.
The Meeting as an Organisational Organism
The meeting is not an accident of poor planning, although poor planning produces many meetings. The meeting is an organisational organism with its own ecology, its own survival mechanisms, and its own evolutionary pressures that operate independently of whether the meeting produces any outcome. Meetings persist not because they are always useful — research from Harvard Business Review and Microsoft’s Work Trend Index consistently finds that the majority of meeting time is considered unproductive by the people in it — but because they serve functions that emails cannot: they signal activity, they produce the feeling of coordination, they allow managers to observe their teams, they give people a defined period in which they are unambiguously working, and they create a rhythm of togetherness that many organisations mistake for the work of collaboration rather than the simulation of it.
This is the meeting’s core proposition, and it is worth stating clearly: the meeting is as much a social and political technology as an informational one. The information exchanged in most meetings could, with reasonable confidence, have been an email. The social signals conveyed in the meeting — who speaks, who defers, who is visibly present, who frames the agenda — cannot be an email. The meeting is where the informal power structure of the organisation is performed and maintained, which is why the people with the most power in organisations tend to call the most meetings and attend the fewest.
A Taxonomy of the Meetings That Should Have Been Emails
Not all meetings are created equal in their emailability. The taxonomy of meeting types and their honest assessment follows.
The Status Update Meeting
Seven people attend. Each reports what they are working on. Nobody has read anyone else’s update in advance. The updates are therefore delivered verbally, taking seven times longer than reading them would have, with the added texture of hedging language and the time cost of transitions between speakers. The manager nods. The meeting ends. Nothing has changed except that forty minutes of collective productivity have been exchanged for information that could have been a shared document updated weekly. Evidence for the email alternative: strong. Probability it becomes an email: low, because the status update meeting makes the manager feel informed in real time, which is different from being informed and which the document cannot replicate.
The Alignment Meeting
The alignment meeting is called because two teams have different understandings of a decision or a process, and the discrepancy needs to be resolved. This is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the common outcome: sixty minutes of discussion produces no documented decision, no owner, and no follow-up action, meaning the misalignment persists and a second alignment meeting will be necessary within a fortnight. The email alternative here is a decision document — a one-page write-up of the proposed resolution with a comment period — which forces the organiser to articulate the decision clearly before the conversation happens and produces a written record. Amazon’s famous writing culture does exactly this. It is more effective than the meeting. It is also harder to prepare and requires the organiser to commit to a specific position rather than letting the room produce one through discussion, which is why it is rarely adopted.
The Recurring Standup That Has Become a Sitdown
The daily standup was designed to be fifteen minutes. It was designed to be standing, which applied physical pressure to keep it short. It was designed to answer three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking me. At some point in its evolution — usually around month two of any team that is using it — it became thirty minutes and seated, acquired a fourth agenda item that is not one of the three questions, began to be used as a venue for discussions that belong elsewhere, and is now functionally a meeting about the meeting it was supposed to replace. The email alternative is a shared async update tool. The reason this is not used is that it requires people to write, which is more effortful than speaking, and it does not produce the ritual of togetherness that the standup has become, which is doing more work than the standup’s stated purpose.
The Meeting to Prepare for the Meeting
This category exists and is not satirical. A meeting is scheduled to discuss what will be discussed in a larger meeting next week. Sometimes a pre-pre-meeting occurs to prepare for the preparation meeting. The organisational logic is not entirely without merit — large meetings benefit from aligned participants who have discussed positions in advance. The problem is that the preparation meeting tends to cover the same ground as the actual meeting, meaning the actual meeting is redundant, meaning the preparation meeting was the meeting, meaning it could have been an email about what will be discussed in a meeting that no longer needs to happen. For the experience of being a team player in all of these meetings, see our companion piece on being the team player nobody listens to.
The Meeting’s Vocabulary: A Field Guide
The meeting has developed its own vocabulary — a set of phrases so deeply embedded in corporate culture that they are deployed without apparent awareness of their frequent meaninglessness. Understanding the translation layer between what these phrases say and what they mean is a modest professional advantage.
“Let’s take this offline.”
What it says: This discussion is too detailed or specific for the whole room, and should be continued separately. What it means: This discussion is making me uncomfortable and/or is taking too long. The follow-up conversation it proposes occurs in approximately forty percent of cases. The remaining sixty percent is silence, with the original issue unresolved, which is technically offline in the sense of having no digital record.
“We should loop in [person not on this call].”
What it says: This decision requires input from someone who was not invited to this meeting, and we cannot proceed without them. What it means: I have just realised that the decision we are making affects someone who should have been here but wasn’t, possibly because the meeting was called with insufficient preparation, which means we cannot proceed, which means a second meeting must be scheduled, which means the first meeting’s primary output is the scheduling of a second meeting. Progress has been made, in the sense that we now know what meeting to have next.
“Let’s park that for now.”
What it says: This point is valid but out of scope for today’s discussion. We will return to it. What it means: This point is going in the parking lot, which is the conceptual space where meeting topics go when they are too complicated or controversial to resolve in the time available and nobody wants to own the action item. Items in the parking lot are retrieved and actioned at a rate that varies from “sometimes” to “the parking lot is effectively where ideas go to become someone else’s problem.” The parking lot is very full.
“Can everyone see my screen?”
What it says: I am about to share my screen, and want to confirm the technology is working. What it means: We are about to lose two to four minutes to technical difficulties, which is fine because the document being shared could have been sent in the invitation and reviewed in advance, but was not, and will now be read aloud by the presenter in real time while attendees read it at their own pace, creating the specific experience of receiving information at approximately a third of the speed that is possible through reading.
“Great, so as a next step…”
What it says: We have concluded something, and action items will now be assigned. What it means: We are out of time and someone needs to provide the illusion of an outcome before people leave. The action items generated at this stage of a meeting tend to be vague (“someone will follow up on this”), unowned (“we should look into that”), or circular (“let’s schedule time to discuss this further”). The meeting will have produced the sensation of progress. The progress itself will be assessed in the next meeting.
The Actual Cost of Meetings Nobody Calculates
The financial cost of meetings is rarely tracked, and this is not an accident. A study by Bain and Company found that for a typical 50-person company, the weekly meeting structure alone consumed approximately 300,000 person-hours per year. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that time spent in meetings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, and that the meeting load has not meaningfully reversed since. The direct salary cost of this time is calculable and, when calculated, tends to produce expressions of mild alarm in the people seeing the number for the first time. A one-hour meeting with eight participants earning average professional salaries costs approximately $400 in direct salary. The meeting that recurs weekly costs approximately $20,000 per year. The five recurring meetings on your team’s weekly calendar cost approximately $100,000 per year. This number does not include the opportunity cost of the work that did not happen during the meeting.
The reason this calculation is not widely shared is that the people who benefit most from meetings — managers and senior leaders, who use them to feel informed, to signal authority, and to observe their teams — are also the people with the least incentive to audit their cost. The people who bear the largest productivity cost of excessive meetings — individual contributors who do their best work in uninterrupted blocks — tend to have the least power to change the meeting culture. This is the structural dynamic underlying the universal complaint about pointless meetings and the equally universal failure to eliminate them.
How to Reduce the Meeting Load Without Being Fired
Declining meetings is politically complicated in most organisations. The meeting carries social weight beyond its informational content, and the person who consistently declines meetings — even meetings that are objectively unnecessary — is often perceived as disengaged, non-collaborative, or insufficiently committed to the team’s way of working. This is an irrational but real dynamic that must be navigated rather than ignored if you want to both have fewer meetings and maintain your career.
- Propose the async alternative explicitly, not just the decline. “I don’t think I need to attend this one” is a career risk. “Would it work if I contributed to this asynchronously — I could have written input to you by Tuesday, which might actually get you the content faster” is a collaboration offer. The second framing proposes a better outcome, not a refusal. Most people will take it if it’s genuine.
- Ask for the agenda before confirming attendance. “Happy to join — could you send an agenda so I can confirm I’m the right person for this?” is a professional question that does two things: it creates accountability for an agenda that likely doesn’t exist, and it gives you legitimate grounds to decline or delegate if the agenda reveals your attendance is unnecessary.
- Set a hard end time and name it in advance. “I have a hard stop at 3:00” at the beginning of a meeting is one of the most powerful meeting-management tools available. It applies temporal pressure to everyone in the room, not just you. Meetings with named end times tend to get to the point faster. This is not an accident — it is Parkinson’s Law in action: work expands to fill the time available, and the corollary is that meetings compress to end before the time runs out if the time is made explicit.
- Document and distribute outcomes immediately. If you are the person who sends the three-bullet meeting summary within an hour of every meeting — what was decided, who owns what, and when — you become the person whose meetings have outcomes. This builds the credibility to suggest, when the next meeting is proposed, that perhaps a summary document would achieve the same result without sixty minutes of everyone’s time.
- Model the email you wish to see. Send the well-structured, clear email that demonstrates what the meeting was going to be but faster and more useful. When the response is “great, that works” rather than “let’s discuss,” you have created a reference point for the next time the same organiser reaches for the meeting invite. Culture changes one incident at a time.
In Defence of the Meeting (With Significant Caveats)
In the interest of fairness, let us acknowledge what meetings genuinely do that emails cannot. The creative energy of a room where people are building on each other’s thinking in real time — the way one person’s half-formed idea triggers another’s completed one — is a real phenomenon that asynchronous tools approximate but do not replicate. The relational work of seeing someone’s face, reading their body language, hearing the hesitation in their voice — these are meaningful data that text cannot carry. The specific human experience of being in a room together and deciding something, which produces a shared ownership of the decision that a documented email chain does not — this matters, particularly for decisions that will be difficult to implement.
The meeting, at its best, is a genuinely powerful tool for the specific work that requires it. The meeting at its worst is a $400 salary burn masquerading as collaboration, a ritual of togetherness that substitutes for productivity while consuming the uninterrupted time that productivity requires. The skill is not to eliminate meetings but to protect the category of meeting that is irreplaceable while ruthlessly converting the rest into what they were born to be: a three-paragraph email that everyone can read in four minutes and respond to whenever they have four minutes. This is not a revolution. It is a slightly better use of a Tuesday afternoon, which is more valuable than it sounds. For related coverage of what happens when the meetings end and the actual work begins, see our piece on being a team player nobody listens to — and browse our full Workplace and Career archive for more.
Reading this in a meeting? Send the three-bullet summary email when it ends. Then look at the next meeting on your calendar and ask the flowchart question: real-time exchange needed? Urgent decision? Agenda exists? If the answers are no, no, no — write the email. Browse the Workplace and Career archive for more, including our annual review piece — which addresses the meeting that is technically not a meeting but is absolutely a meeting, held once a year, in which your year of meetings is evaluated.