There's a running joke in almost every office: the meeting to plan the meeting. Most people laugh because they recognize it immediately. The sad part is that nobody seems to know how to stop the cycle.
I started tracking how much time I spent in meetings a few years back—really tracking, not just feeling like it was a lot. The number came out to about 18 hours a week. Eighteen. That left maybe 22 hours of actual work time, minus interruptions, emails, and the mental overhead of switching between tasks. It was eye-opening in a deeply depressing way.
The problem isn't meetings. It's undisciplined meetings.
Here's the thing people get wrong: the solution isn't fewer meetings. Some meetings are genuinely useful. A project kickoff where everyone gets aligned on the brief, a retrospective where the team actually learns something, a coaching session that changes how someone approaches their work—these have real value.
The problem is that most meetings lack three things: a clear decision to be made, the right people in the room, and a time limit that actually gets enforced. Without those three, you're not having a meeting. You're having a conversation with overhead.
What tends to actually work
Default to async for information sharing. If the purpose of the meeting is to update people on something, ask yourself whether a written update would do the same job. It almost always does—and it gives people time to read, absorb, and respond thoughtfully rather than on the spot. Status updates, progress reports, announcements: these don't need everyone in a room at the same time.
Write a one-sentence meeting goal before you send the invite. Not an agenda with five bullet points—one sentence that completes this prompt: "By the end of this meeting, we will have decided/resolved/agreed on ___." If you can't fill in that blank, you don't have a meeting yet. You have a topic, which is different.
Smaller rooms make better decisions. The "two pizza rule" gets repeated so often it's become cliché, but there's something real underneath it. When more than six or seven people are in a room, two things tend to happen: the loudest voices dominate, and the quieter people disengage. If certain people only need to know the outcome, send them the notes rather than requiring their presence.
Start and end on time, every time. This sounds obvious. It's almost never practiced. When meetings routinely start five or ten minutes late, people learn to show up late. When meetings routinely run over, people learn to schedule buffers. The solution isn't a longer calendar block—it's finishing on time even if you haven't covered everything. Whatever didn't get resolved either wasn't actually on the agenda or needs its own dedicated session.
The cultural piece
None of this works if the person running the meeting doesn't model it consistently. The habits that make meetings worthwhile aren't policies you roll out—they're behaviors that get normalized over time by people who actually enforce them.
If you lead a team, the single most useful thing you can do is end your next meeting ten minutes early because you hit the decision point. Don't fill the remaining time. Just end it. People notice that more than any training session or meeting charter you could roll out.
Meetings will never disappear. They're how teams align, how decisions get made, how relationships get built. The goal isn't to eliminate them—it's to make sure that when you ask someone to stop what they're doing and show up, there's a good reason for it.