Last Tuesday afternoon I had what you might call a moment of clarity, sitting there in yet another video call watching my own face in that little rectangle while someone droned on about quarterly metrics. Forty-five minutes of my life I’ll never get back, all to learn information that could’ve been typed up in maybe three sentences. I mean, really – did we need eight people on a call to hear that our social media engagement went up twelve percent?
Been keeping track lately, which probably makes me sound obsessive, but I figure I’ve lost somewhere around 11,400 hours of my career to meetings that should’ve been emails. That’s not even counting the time spent trying to figure out why my audio wasn’t working or watching people struggle with screen sharing for ten minutes. You know how it goes – “Can everyone see my screen?” followed by five people saying yes while one person types “no” in the chat, and then we all wait while they restart their computer.
Here’s what gets me. I’ve been at my firm for twenty-eight years, and I remember when we actually had to walk down the hall to talk to someone. If you had a quick question, you’d stick your head in their office, get your answer, and that was it. Thirty seconds, tops. Now that same question becomes a thirty-minute “quick sync” with three other people who don’t even need to be there but got invited anyway because someone hit “reply all” on the calendar invite.
The math on this stuff is ridiculous. Last week I sat through a meeting with six people – let’s say we’re all making about fifty bucks an hour on average – so that’s three hundred dollars the company spent for us to listen to updates that could’ve been written in a memo. Multiply that by however many pointless meetings happen every day, and we’re talking about millions of dollars basically set on fire. But hey, at least we all got to see each other’s living rooms, right?
What really drives me crazy is how we all know these meetings are useless within the first five minutes, but nobody wants to be the one to say it. We just sit there, trapped, watching the clock tick down while someone explains something that made perfect sense in the email they sent yesterday. I’ve started playing a little game where I count how many times someone says “So just to circle back on this” or “Let’s take this offline.” Record so far is seventeen circle-backs in one forty-minute call.
The worst part is when you get that meeting invite with no agenda. Just “Team Check-in” or “Quick Touch Base” with no other information. Those are the ones that make me want to retire early. You show up not knowing if it’s going to be five minutes or an hour, not knowing what you’re supposed to prepare, just hoping it’s not another brainstorming session where two people talk while everyone else mentally writes their grocery lists.
My daughter thinks it’s funny how much this bothers me. She works for some startup where apparently they have “no meeting Wednesdays” and actually stick to it. Meanwhile, I’m looking at my calendar and seeing back-to-back rectangles from nine to five like some kind of digital prison sentence. When someone asks how my day’s looking, the answer is always “booked solid” – which used to mean you were important but now just means you’re trapped.
Linda and I were talking about this over dinner last week, and she mentioned her office has a standing weekly meeting that’s been going on for four months even though the project it was created for ended in July. Nobody wants to be the one to cancel it because what if they miss something important? So eight people keep showing up every Thursday to discuss a project that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s the kind of logic that makes my head hurt.
The pandemic made everything worse, obviously. Suddenly every conversation that used to happen in the hallway became a scheduled video call. Need to ask someone a quick question? Better set up a Zoom. Want to check on a project status? Time for a team meeting. We went from maybe three or four meetings a week to three or four meetings a day, all because we lost the ability to just walk over to someone’s desk.
And don’t get me started on the technical difficulties. I’ve probably spent forty hours of my life watching people try to figure out why their microphone isn’t working. “Can you hear me now? How about now?” while the rest of us sit there waiting. Or my personal favorite – when someone forgets to mute themselves and we all get to listen to their dog barking or their kids fighting in the background. Real productive use of everyone’s time.
I started keeping notes about the most ridiculous meetings I’ve attended. There was the ninety-minute call about updating a document template – something that could’ve been handled with a shared document and comments. The hour-long “brainstorming session” where we came up with three ideas that were all variations of what we discussed in an email thread the day before. The forty-five minute status update where each person spent five minutes saying they had nothing new to report.
My favorite recent development is people scheduling meetings with themselves to block time on their calendars. My coworker Dave has fake meetings called “Deep Work” and “Project Focus Time” just so people can’t book over those hours. It’s like we’re playing defense against our own calendars. When did that become normal?
The really frustrating part is that we have all these tools designed to reduce the need for meetings. Shared documents where people can add comments. Project management software that tracks everything automatically. Instant messaging for quick questions. But instead of using them to eliminate meetings, we just have meetings about the stuff in those tools. “Let’s hop on a call to go through the comments on this document.” Why? The comments are right there!
I’ve started pushing back a little, which feels dangerous at my age but necessary for my sanity. When someone sends me a meeting invite without an agenda, I ask for one. When I get invited to something where I’m not sure why I need to be there, I ask if my presence is actually required or if I can just read the notes afterward. Small acts of rebellion, maybe, but they’ve saved me a few hours here and there.
Some of the younger people at my firm seem to thrive on this meeting culture. They’re comfortable being on video all day, switching between different calls, multitasking during the boring parts. Me? By three in the afternoon, I’m exhausted from pretending to pay attention to discussions about topics that could’ve been covered in a paragraph.
The economics professor at Northwestern did a study recently showing that knowledge workers spend about twenty-one hours a week in meetings now, compared to fifteen hours a decade ago. That’s an extra day and a half of meetings every week. A day and a half that used to be spent doing actual work. No wonder everyone feels like they’re always behind – we’re spending more time talking about work than doing it.
What I find particularly maddening is the meeting about the meeting syndrome. First there’s the pre-meeting to prepare for the main meeting. Then there’s the main meeting. Then there’s the follow-up meeting to discuss what was decided in the main meeting. Three meetings to accomplish what could’ve been done in one email with bullet points. But somehow this passes for thorough communication.
I dream sometimes about a world where meetings require justification, like a budget request. Want to schedule an hour with six people? You better have a really good reason and a clear agenda showing why this can’t be handled asynchronously. Some companies are apparently trying this approach, treating meeting time as a limited resource that has to be spent wisely. Revolutionary concept, right?
Until that happens, though, I’ll be the guy in the corner of your screen, strategically nodding at appropriate intervals while actually getting real work done on my second monitor. Because somebody around here has to handle the actual accounting while we’re all busy having meetings about having meetings. Just don’t tell anyone I said that – I’ve still got seven years until I can retire and escape this calendar nightmare for good.
The saddest part is knowing that somewhere, right now, there’s probably a meeting being scheduled to discuss why there are too many meetings. And you know what? I’ll probably get invited to it.
Paul’s a Chicago accountant learning to survive in the cloud-software era. He writes candidly (and funnily) about being tech-competent but perpetually one update behind. His motto: technology is great—once someone explains where they’ve hidden the settings.
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