Last Tuesday at 2:17 PM, I had what I can only describe as a spiritual epiphany. “Just one minute before that participant unmuted, I became self-aware while staring at my own reflection. I witnessed my soul completely disengage from my psychical self.” How I got to those thoughts was because I could finally comprehend the sheer depth of everything as a single piece of information being discussed in the 45 minute long virtual quarterly meeting on social media metrics being conducted entirely “effortlessly” in a single Power-Point-slide.
As, roughly estimating, 11,400 hours worth of my professional existence can be attributed simply to meetings that could have effectively achieved the same outcome logic wise with simple emails, such as these. From my iPhone I fired up work and before unplugging for the day, I clocked these up to listening in to online sessions a total of reading texts out loud, announcing device functions (such as ‘screen sharing’ or ‘audio problems’), having inaudible audio riddles as experiences without the practical use appearing in shareholders meeting devoid of a functioning itinerary screen). If we could conceive hyper real conditions for tackled constantly appearing incomprehensible universes, personally, that seems the easiest route and I’m taking it.
The irony of it all is still palpable. At [redacted major tech company] my tech obsession led me to assist in the development of communication tools designed to liberate us from needless meetings. We developed systems that liberated us asynchronously—systems that provided us with means of working together without having to do so in real time. We designed shared documents and comments as well as chat and bulletin boards meant to minimize the reliance on meetings. Our advertising claimed we “give freedom back to your calendar,” and “taking back your time” was a staple promise in almost every team’s blueprint.
Somehow, along with all this “advancement” in technology, meeting culture as a whole didn’t decline—oh no, instead it has grown at an alarming rate. Every information worker spends an average of 21.5 hours a week in meetings, which is 30% more than a decade ago. Remote work, rather than lessening the burden, has the opposite effect. Lacking the basic set of physical conference rooms, and humans’ travel bounding zones tied hands, our calendars have formed perfect geometric grids where each rectangle vividly indicates yet another sacrificed hour trapped in back-to-back meetings.
The taxonomy of pointless meetings is, at the same time, intricate and utterly bland. There is the “status update” meeting. It is my favorite because participants slowly share information that could have been written down in about a fifth of the time. Then there is the “brainstorming” session – in which three overly chatty participants brainstorm while the rest of the group mentally does their grocery shopping. Let us not forget the “team building” exercise which builds only group hatred and resentment. Finally, my favorite is the “quick sync,” which is basically a recurring meeting that is neither quick nor synchronized. Unfortunately, once calendar invites are set, the attendees remain trapped until freed by retirement or death.
Now think about the offensive economics for a second, shall we? Consider a meeting containing eight participants with the average salary of $50 per hour. That particular meeting would cost the organization $400 for each hour. In a mid-sized company, if you multiply these numbers by the thousands of pointless meetings that happen on a daily basis, it would add up to millions wasted on useless tasks that can be achieved through a few clear paragraphs. Effectively, that means we stood as a society, came to the conclusion that we will burn lots of money just to see it burn while everyone observes via webcam.
Everyone is on the same page about the productivity strain and time wastage elements. And then there is the unique brand of cognitive dissonance where within 3 minutes, most people would know that the meeting is useless yet have to endure being trapped for the remainder of the time. An exquisitely distinct form of anxiety exists where the participant’s attention is focused solely on the clock and a slow-moving discussion threatens to creep across the slim 15 minute buffer before the next call. Perhaps the most exquisite form dread comes when someone 3 levels up an organization sends a meeting invitation with no agenda, purpose, and calls it “Just Touching Base”.
And these phenomena have become so accepted as a norm that they do not need to be treated as the pathologies they stem from. Getting asked the so common “How’s your day looking?” instantly morphs into “How severely has your calendar been colonized by meetings?” It effortlessly transforms to the echoing response of “Back-to-back until 5” during the stark meeting-binge hours. While horribly exhausting, there is a hint of smugness identifying calendar congestion as a ranking indication of importance. People confess to being overwhelmed with meetings, yet judge unscheduled time as time wasted.
As a form of group therapy, I’ve been collecting my coworkers’ meeting horror stories. For this article, Sarah from marketing described a standing weekly meeting that continued for three months long after the project it was created for had been completed. Dev from engineering admitted that he built a small script that autonomously moves his mouse and taps his keyboard during particularly dull meetings just to maintain the appearance of engagement, all while doing productive work on another device. Tanya from legal openly admitted to scheduling fake meetings with herself as calendar block placeholders which serve as defensive blocks. Digital cutouts of those inflatable driver decoys used to thwart carjackers.
The uncontrolled proliferation of meetings received an absurd boost from the work-from-home policy put in place during the pandemic. The lack of physical proximity to coworkers who could provide casual quick questions or updates led to automatic scheduling of video meetings for interactions that previously happened freely. When blended with the underlying need for connection during isolation, the need to be ‘seen’ in meetings also led to remote workers being viewed as forgotten for promotions, both fueling this paradox.
The most dangerous aspect is that video meetings provided semblance of productivity devoid of actual work. ‘Calendars’ became a visible metric of busyness while actual productivity remained elusive. Managers who were unable to see their reports in person compensated by booking endless check-ins, syncs, and touch bases until their teams were empty of time to perform the work they were supposedly checking in on. The outcome: extremely work-heavy discussions that starve actual performative work.
Technological solutions do exist. I know this because I was part of the teams that built them. Asynchronous tools, collaborative documents, and even project management software, all aimed at reducing the need for meetings. They are, however, underused while the calendars continue to pile up. The problem does not lie within technology, but rather within culture and psychology. An organizational addiction to communications reliant on real-time exchanges suffers despite all evidence suggesting it is inefficient.
The enablers of this dependency are rather clear. To begin with, the meeting arranger who prefers to schedule a meeting rather than write an email or a summary. The meeting enthusiast who truly thinks that face-to-face interaction is always better than remote interaction (spoiler alert: it’s not). The meeting hostage without any authority to refuse attending organizational meetings. And possibly worst of all, the meeting martyr who celebrates back-to-back calendar bookings with vague indicators of importance, signaling that open time suggests a lack of value at work.
I’ve been all of these at one time or another in my professional life. I have created the “lazy invite” which is synonymous with doing minimal effort for meetings without emails explaining the clear objectives for the meetings followed by an agenda. I have complained about being overbooked while to the other side of the meeting room filling calendar with my own obligatory meetings. I was stuck resenting meetings where I had zero options and active unwillingness to join, but within the context, I never felt like I could say no. So, I ended up carrying on five years of culture I detested during happy hours and hoped can be changed.
I vividly remember the onset of my breaking point being an hour and a half long video call on the internal updates of yet another document template. By the middle of the second hour, I realized that I was stuck in a meeting about a multi-page document ‘format’ which could be dealt with via a shared document with comments enabled, a tool that I had helped design to avoid meetings precisely like this. I could not help but wonder whether they were truly reaching for the moon when redeeming themselves from this situation, because the level of absurdity I was facing had completely exhausted me.
That ‘aha’ moment was the first step towards my attempt of trying to apply small acts of meeting anarchy and practicing active refusing meeting culture. And that too, very selectively on the ones that do not have a detailed agenda and several other listed pointers that I am fond of. The end result is reserved for those meetings which so to say, may I encourage an async setting at a time that pleases me or rather my schedule gracing them if need be. These micro acts aimed at anarchy have not aided in changing any cultures per say, but have assisted in granting small chunks of time that can be devoted towards work rather than these productivity sucking gatherings.
For those capable of wielding workplace capital, more radical avenues exist. Some progressive companies have implemented meeting-free days—entire calendar blocks during which employees are prohibited from any synchronous gatherings to enable focused work. Others have enacted “meeting budgets”, where scheduled time is treated as a limited resource that requires explicit justification for being spent. One particularly audacious startup even rolled out a policy where any meeting attendee could invoke the phrase “This meeting could have been an email” and immediately end the meeting while requiring the organizer to send out a written debrief instead.
These alterations are still edge cases. The average knowledge worker remains shackled to meetings of little to no value for almost 50 percent of their so-called productive hours, watching fellow employees struggle with screen sharing, listening to pets barking in the background, and mentally devising responses to emails that they could be answering while languishing in video rectangles discussing matters that truly do not necessitate real-time interaction.
It is not solely time wasted, but rather wasted potential which is a true tragedy. Every unreseded meeting is not just hours forfeited, but also the unrealized productivity within those hours—the strong arguments that were not written, the thorough analyses that were not completed, the ingenious solutions that were not formulated—all because we were diverting our attention to concepts that could have been summed up in a few concise sentences.
Therefore, the next time you find your spirit leaving your body while a seemingly futile status update drags on for twenty minutes, keep in mind that this is an example of the collective ailment of contemporary work life. The affliction of modern work life is not a lack of technology, but rather due to the structural courage which refrains us from adopting it. This condition persists because we are lacking organizational courage. The answer to the problem of calendric servitude begins with the revolutionary perspective: “Could this gathering be passive listening session?” If the answer is Yes, then it is best that you shut your calendars and start up your word processors.
Until then, see you on the call that was described as video with the email containing the instructions reduce tasks of meeting to fill in the blank four sentence email. I will be the one in notoriously stationary video frame, discreetly busy with actual work while appearing on one’s head in strategic nodding schedule.
