Expertspost
I once added up the hours I spent in meetings during a normal week and then sat very still for a few minutes. It was more than half my working time. And if I'm honest, maybe a quarter of those meetings produced anything I couldn't have gotten from a two-line message. That was the week I decided to start treating meetings as something that has to justify itself.
The good news is that you have more leverage over meetings than the general gloom about them suggests, especially the ones you organize. You can't fix the whole company's calendar. You can absolutely fix yours.
Make the meeting earn its place
My first rule is that a meeting has to clear a bar before it exists. The bar is simple: does this genuinely need several people talking at the same time, or is it just information that could be written down?
A surprising amount of meeting content is one person updating everyone else. That's not a meeting, that's a memo with worse acoustics. Status updates, announcements, "let me walk you through this document" sessions, most of these are better as a short written message that people read when they have a minute.
The things that actually deserve a meeting are decisions that need back-and-forth, messy problems that benefit from people building on each other live, and the occasional conversation that's really about relationships and trust rather than information. When I started asking "could this be a message?" before sending an invite, my own meeting count dropped fast.
No agenda, no meeting
If I'm running it, there's an agenda, even a tiny one. Three bullet points on what we need to decide or solve. No agenda means I haven't actually thought about what the meeting is for, which means it'll wander.
The agenda does two jobs. It forces me to clarify the purpose before I steal an hour of other people's lives, and it lets attendees show up prepared instead of thinking out loud for the first ten minutes. I send it ahead of time, even if "ahead of time" is just an hour.
If you can't write down what a meeting is for, that is your answer about whether to have it.
When someone invites me to a meeting with no agenda and no clear purpose, I've gotten comfortable asking, politely, what we're hoping to decide. Half the time the answer makes it clear I don't need to be there, which is its own small victory. Declining gracefully is a skill, and I wrote about it in how to say no at work.
Fewer people, shorter clock
Two levers shrink a meeting's cost dramatically: who's in the room and how long the clock runs.
On people: every extra attendee makes the meeting slower and more expensive, and adds someone who probably didn't need to be there. I now invite the smallest group that can actually make the decision. Anyone who just needs to know the outcome gets the notes afterward instead. People are almost always relieved to be uninvited.
On time: meetings expand to fill whatever slot you give them, so I give them less. I schedule 25 minutes instead of 30, and 50 instead of 60. The odd-numbered length is deliberate; it builds in a breather before the next thing and quietly signals that we're not going to dawdle. A 25-minute meeting with three people and an agenda is a different species from a vague hour with nine.
The ending matters most
The most common way meetings fail isn't that they're too long. It's that they end without anyone knowing what happens next. Everyone nods, leaves, and three people each think someone else owns the follow-up.
So I spend the last few minutes on one thing: who is doing what by when. Out loud, specific, written down.
- What did we decide? Stated plainly, even if it's "we decided to wait two weeks."
- What are the actions, and who owns each one? A task without an owner is a wish.
- By when? A deadline, even a rough one, beats "soon."
This takes maybe three minutes and salvages meetings that would otherwise evaporate. I send those notes around afterward, kept to a few lines. Nobody reads a wall of minutes, but everyone can scan four bullet points.
Meetings you only attend
Most advice assumes you run the meeting. Often you don't, you're just a body in the chair, and that's where it gets harder. You can't impose an agenda on someone else's meeting.
What you can do is be honest, kindly, about whether you need to be there. I've started replying to some invites with a genuine question: "Happy to join, but is there a specific part you need me for? I could also just read the notes." Asked in good faith, this is almost never taken badly, and it occasionally prompts the organizer to rethink the whole invite list.
For the meetings I can't escape, I've made peace with using them differently. If a recurring meeting is reliably low-value and I can't get out of it, I'll sometimes use it for a quiet, low-stakes task while staying present enough to chime in. Not ideal, and I wouldn't do it in a meeting that matters. But a calendar is finite, and protecting your real focus time, which I get into in getting an hour of real focus, sometimes means making peace with the meetings you can't kill.
