I counted last week. Seventeen meetings in five days. Of those seventeen, four produced a decision. Three produced useful information I couldn't have gotten from a document. The other ten could have been emails, Slack messages, or nothing at all. That's ten hours of my week - and everyone else's week - spent in rooms where nothing happened.
The Problem Isn't Meetings
Let me be clear about this. Meetings aren't inherently bad. Some problems genuinely require people in a room (or on a call) working through something together. Design reviews, difficult conversations, collaborative problem-solving, alignment on ambiguous direction - these need meetings.
The problem is that most organisations treat meetings as the default mode of communication. Need to share an update? Meeting. Need to ask a question? Meeting. Need to make a decision? Meeting - but also three meetings before the meeting to prepare for the meeting.
71%
of senior managers said meetings are unproductive and inefficient
Source: Harvard Business Review, 2022
The cultural default is "when in doubt, schedule a meeting." And nobody pushes back because declining a meeting feels political. You don't want to seem disengaged. You don't want to miss something. So you accept, attend, and spend the time doing email on your laptop while someone shares their screen.
What Good Meetings Have
I've been thinking about this for a while and the meetings that actually work share four characteristics.
A decision to be made. Not "discuss X" but "decide Y." If the meeting has no decision, it's an information share, and information shares should be documents.
The right people. Not everyone who might be interested. The people who need to be involved in the decision. If you have more than eight people in a decision-making meeting, you're not making decisions. You're performing consensus.
Preparation distributed in advance. If I need to read something to participate meaningfully, send it 24 hours before. Don't spend the first twenty minutes of the meeting presenting information that could have been read asynchronously.
A documented outcome. What was decided, who owns what, and by when. If the meeting ends without a written outcome, it didn't happen. Two weeks later nobody will remember what was agreed. I've seen the same decision "made" in three consecutive meetings because nobody wrote it down.
If your meeting doesn't end with a written decision and clear owners, you didn't have a meeting. They don't move projects forward.
Tim Hatherley-Greene
Chief Operating Officer
The Remote Work Amplifier
COVID made this worse, not better. When everyone went remote, the response was more meetings to compensate for the loss of hallway conversations. Stand-ups, check-ins, syncs, catch-ups, alignment sessions. The calendar filled up and the actual work got squeezed into the gaps.
Two years into hybrid work, most organisations haven't unwound this. The meetings that were added as emergency measures became permanent fixtures. Nobody questions them because they've been happening for two years and removing them feels risky.
What We Do Differently
We're a small team, which helps. But the principles scale.
Default to async. Updates, status reports, FYIs - these go in Slack or a shared document. If you find yourself typing a meeting invite for something that could be a message, stop.
Every meeting has a purpose statement. Not an agenda. A purpose. "Decide the integration approach for the claims module" is a purpose. "Discuss the claims module" is not.
No spectators. If you don't need to be there, don't come. This isn't rude. It's respectful of everyone's time. We actively tell people "you don't need to be in this one, we'll share the outcome."
Fifteen minutes is a valid meeting length. Not everything needs an hour. If the decision is straightforward and the preparation was done in advance, fifteen minutes is enough. The meeting expands to fill the time allocated. Allocate less time.
Fridays are meeting-free. This is the one that made the biggest difference. One day a week with unbroken time for focused work. The team protects it aggressively and productivity on Fridays is visibly higher than any other day.
The Calculation Nobody Does
Here's the arithmetic that should terrify every manager. A one-hour meeting with eight people isn't a one-hour meeting. It's eight hours of organisational time. That's a full working day. Was the meeting worth a full working day of productivity?
For decision meetings with the right people: yes, usually. For status updates that could be a document: absolutely not.
If an organisation with 500 people reduced unnecessary meetings by just 20%, that's thousands of hours per year returned to actual work. The ROI on meeting discipline is staggering and nobody measures it.
The Cultural Shift
The hardest part isn't the tactics. It's the culture. In most organisations, being busy with meetings signals importance. Having an empty calendar signals you're not involved enough. That's backwards, but it's deeply embedded.
Changing it requires leadership modelling. If the CEO declines meetings that don't have a clear purpose, others feel permission to do the same. If the CEO's calendar is wall-to-wall meetings, everyone else's will be too.
I don't have a magic fix for meeting culture. But I know the first step: start counting. How many meetings did you have this week? How many produced a decision? The gap between those two numbers is your opportunity.