Monday morning, 9 a.m. Your calendar shows six meetings until 5 p.m. Between appointments: 30 minutes for \u201creal work\u201d. You already know that at least three of these meetings are a waste of time. Yet you still go. In the evening you ask yourself: What did I actually get done today? <\/p>\n\n
\nMost meetings should not exist. And the ones that should exist run too long and deliver too little. The average manager spends 23 hours a week in meetings. Something is fundamentally wrong. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
A managing director I supported ran an experiment: for one week, she cancelled all meetings that did not require a clear decision. Of 28 weekly meetings, seven remained. Not a single cancelled one was missed. \u201cThe frightening part wasn\u2019t that we cancelled them,\u201d she said. \u201cThe frightening part was that nobody had questioned them for years.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
Why we still invite people\u2014and show up<\/h2>\n\n
If meetings are so unproductive, why do we not stop? Meetings feel like work, a full calendar signals importance, and that is more comfortable than asking whether this activity produces results. Meetings avoid responsibility<\/a>: if everyone was there, no one alone bears responsibility for the decision. Meetings replace trust: if you do not trust that information will get through, you call a meeting. And declining feels impolite, so we say yes and get annoyed afterwards. <\/p>\n\n
What nobody calculates: a one-hour meeting with eight people costs eight working hours. Plus preparation time, plus context switching. Would anyone approve eight hours of work time for this topic? Probably not. <\/p>\n\n
Peter Drucker put it succinctly: by definition, meetings are a concession to poor organisation. Because you either work or you meet. You cannot do both at the same time. <\/p>\n\n
\nMeetings are the only activity where organisations routinely pay eight people to do the work of two.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
When a meeting is truly necessary<\/h2>\n\n
Not every meeting is bad. But the distinction needs to be sharper. A meeting is necessary when a decision must be made that requires multiple perspectives, when complex topics must be discussed in real time, when conflicts must be resolved that would escalate in writing, or when creative collaboration is required. <\/p>\n\n
A meeting is not necessary when information is merely being distributed, when updates do not require discussion, when one person can and should decide, when the topic concerns only two people, or when nobody is prepared.<\/p>\n\n