Every workday, millions of people shuffle into conference rooms, click “join meeting” on their calendars, or dial into video calls with a familiar sense of resignation. We’ve all been there—sitting through yet another hour-long discussion that could have been an email, watching colleagues talk past each other, or waiting for someone to finally make a decision that never comes. Despite our collective frustration with meetings, we keep scheduling more of them, trapped in a cycle that drains productivity rather than enhancing it.
The fundamental problem with most meetings is that they lack a clear purpose. Too often, someone decides that a topic needs to be “discussed” without defining what that discussion should accomplish. Should the group make a decision? Share information? Solve a specific problem? Without knowing the answer, participants arrive unprepared, unsure of what’s expected of them. The meeting drifts from topic to topic, occasionally touching on something important before veering off into tangents. Everyone leaves with a vague sense that something happened, but if you asked them to identify concrete outcomes, they’d struggle to name more than one or two.
This aimlessness becomes even more problematic when meetings include too many people. The instinct to be inclusive means inviting anyone who might have relevant input or who should “stay in the loop.” But research consistently shows that group decision-making becomes exponentially more difficult as size increases. With eight or ten people in a room, a few dominant voices inevitably take over while others check out mentally. Those who might have valuable contributions stay silent, either because they can’t find an opening to speak or because they’ve learned that their input won’t change the predetermined outcome anyway. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost multiplies with each additional attendee—if ten people spend an hour in an unproductive meeting, that’s ten hours of work not happening.
The scheduling of meetings itself reveals how little we value focused work time. Meetings fragment the workday into small, unusable chunks. A software engineer who needs deep concentration to solve a complex problem finds their morning interrupted by a thirty-minute sync, their afternoon broken by a project review. They arrive at each meeting still mentally engaged with their previous task and leave needing time to rebuild their focus. The actual time spent in meetings may be only a few hours, but the cognitive switching cost means their effective working time shrinks dramatically. Some studies suggest that it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to fully regain concentration after an interruption. When your calendar is riddled with meetings, you never get those twenty-three minutes.
Many meetings also suffer from the absence of the one person who could actually make them productive: the decision-maker. Teams gather to discuss options, debate approaches, and identify concerns, but if no one present has the authority or information to make a call, the meeting becomes an elaborate exercise in postponement. Everyone agrees to “take this offline,” “circle back,” or “set up a follow-up meeting”—phrases that translate to “we just wasted everyone’s time.” The decision-maker, meanwhile, is probably in their own unproductive meeting, creating a cascading effect of delayed action across the organization.
Even when meetings have clear agendas and the right attendees, they often fail because of poor execution. The person running the meeting hasn’t prepared adequately, so they’re figuring out what to cover as they go. Participants haven’t reviewed relevant materials beforehand, leading to lengthy explanations of background information that everyone should already know. Side conversations break out, people multitask on their laptops or phones, and the meeting stretches past its allotted time because the facilitator can’t bring discussions to a close. What should have taken thirty minutes becomes an hour, further eating into everyone’s productive time.Technology has made meetings more accessible but hasn’t made them more effective. Video conferencing means people can attend meetings from anywhere, which sounds like an improvement until you realize it also means they can schedule more meetings than ever before. The twenty-minute gap between commitments that used to provide a natural buffer for travel now gets filled with another video call. Remote participants face additional challenges—they’re easier to ignore in discussions, more likely to experience technical issues, and more tempted to multitask since no one can see their full screen. The hybrid meeting, with some people in a room and others calling in, often creates a two-tiered experience where remote participants become second-class citizens.
Perhaps most insidiously, meetings perpetuate themselves through organizational culture. Companies develop identities around having lots of meetings, equating busy calendars with importance and productivity. Managers feel they’re not doing their jobs unless they’re attending and organizing meetings, even when their teams would prefer more autonomy and fewer interruptions. The meeting becomes a performance of work rather than actual work, a place where people demonstrate their engagement by speaking up, asking questions, or sharing updates that no one really needs to hear in real-time.
The irony is that many of the goals meetings are meant to accomplish could be achieved more efficiently through other means. Information that needs to be shared could be sent in a well-written memo or document. Quick questions could be resolved through instant messaging. Decisions could be made through a brief exchange of emails or a collaborative document where people add their input asynchronously. These alternatives would allow people to engage with the material on their own schedule, when they have the mental bandwidth to think carefully, and without disrupting their flow of focused work.When meetings are genuinely necessary—when you truly need real-time discussion, brainstorming, or relationship-building—they can be valuable. The problem is that most meetings aren’t necessary in this way. They happen because they’ve always happened, because someone wanted to be seen doing something, or because it felt easier to gather everyone together than to think through what really needed to be communicated and to whom. We default to meetings as a lowest-common-denominator solution, even when the problem calls for something more targeted and thoughtful.
Breaking free from unproductive meetings requires a cultural shift that most organizations aren’t willing to make. It means giving people permission to decline meeting invitations when they don’t need to be there. It means insisting that every meeting have a clear purpose, a real agenda, and a designated decision-maker. It means protecting time for focused work and recognizing that someone’s absence from a meeting might mean they’re doing something more important. Most fundamentally, it requires acknowledging that gathering people together is expensive—not just in direct salary costs, but in the opportunity cost of all the work they’re not doing while they sit through another discussion that goes nowhere.
Until we reckon with these realities, we’ll continue to book conference rooms, fire up our video calls, and wonder why we never seem to have enough time to get our actual work done. The meetings will continue, and so will the productivity drain they represent.
