Meetings Ate My Calendar

Then the Meeting Began Reproducing

There was once a meeting.

It had a purpose. A few people needed to discuss something, make a decision, and move on with their lives.

Then someone scheduled a prep meeting for the meeting. Reasonable enough. Important meeting.

The prep meeting revealed everyone was not fully aligned, so an alignment meeting appeared before the prep meeting. Then came the actual meeting, followed by the debrief, the readout, and the follow up. If something went wrong, there was a postmortem. If nothing had happened yet, apparently there could still be a premortem.

Corporate meetings have become so sophisticated that something can now die before it happens.

At some point in the evolution of modern work, the meeting escaped containment.

It started reproducing. We got touch bases, check ins, syncs, deep dives, working sessions, calibration meetings, steering committees, town halls, skip levels, retrospectives, workshops, and the Quick 15, which tends to discover around minute fourteen that everyone somehow has another half hour available.

Then came the asynchronous sync, a synchronous meeting created to discuss asynchronous communication.

Even the stand up has evolved. The original idea was wonderfully primitive: if everyone had to stand, surely the meeting would remain short. We solved that problem by sitting down. Now the stand up can comfortably last 45 minutes.

And, of course, there is the recurring meeting.

Nobody remembers who created it. The original organizer may have left the company. The project has changed names twice. Nobody is entirely certain what belongs on the agenda anymore. Still, every Tuesday at 10:00, eight people appear.

Because it is Tuesday.

The recurring meeting has achieved immortality.

Meetings Are Actually Useful

It would be easy to turn all of this into an argument against meetings. That would also be wrong.

A good meeting can accomplish an extraordinary amount of work. Put the right people into a conversation with a clear problem and something that survived two weeks of email can disappear in 10 minutes. Debate exposes assumptions. A difficult conversation becomes easier when tone and context are present. Sometimes people need to look at each other, disagree, work through the disagreement, and decide.

Anyone who has survived a 34 message email chain that slowly became a hostage negotiation understands the value of speaking.

The interesting problem is how something useful becomes excessive.

Most meetings have perfectly respectable parents. Someone wants alignment. Another person wants visibility. A leader wants broader input. A team wants to reduce risk. Nobody wants another function to say, “We weren't aware of that,” three weeks from now.

So we schedule a meeting.

Then someone decides we should align before the meeting so we don't waste time getting aligned during the meeting. Occasionally, another conversation is needed to make sure the right people attend the alignment meeting.

At some point, we are aligning on the alignment.

This is how calendars get eaten. One perfectly defensible bite at a time.

Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of 31,000 people across 31 countries, found that inefficient meetings ranked as the number one productivity disruptor. Too many meetings ranked third, and 68 percent of respondents said they didn't have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday.

So there is some data behind the feeling. Still, most of us didn't need the study.

We had Thursday.

Welcome to Calendar Tetris

Meeting overload looks surprisingly harmless when viewed one invitation at a time.

9:00 to 9:30. Fine.

10:00 to 11:00. Fine.

11:30 to noon. Fine.

1:00 to 1:30. Fine.

2:00 to 3:00. Fine.

3:30 to 4:00. Fine.

Look closely and there is plenty of open time. Look realistically and the day is dead.

This is where we encounter The Fifteen Minutes You Cannot Use.

Fifteen minutes is enough time to answer two emails, refill your coffee, squeeze in a bio break, stare suspiciously at the next invitation, and wonder whether you really need to attend it. It is rarely enough time to get your mind deeply into something that requires concentration.

Then the reminder appears.

Meeting in 5 minutes.

Fine.

You join and hear, “We'll give everyone another minute to hop on.”

Eventually someone asks, “Can everyone see my screen?”

Someone cannot.

Someone else is on mute.

The meeting begins.

By 4:00, you have spent most of the day talking about priorities, reviewing priorities, aligning on priorities, and identifying the priorities that will become priorities next quarter.

Then comes the sentence that captures an entire category of modern work.

“Great. Now I can get some work done.”

Microsoft found that the average employee in its 2023 Microsoft 365 data spent 57% of time communicating through meetings, email, and chat, compared with 43% creating in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Apparently, one of the obstacles to getting work done is discussing all the work we need to get done.

One Hour Is Rarely One Hour

Calendars also perform a useful accounting trick.

A one-hour meeting looks like one hour.

Invite 12 people and it becomes 12 hours of organizational capacity. Add the preparation, the deck, the pre-read nobody read, and the follow up, and suddenly the little blue rectangle on the calendar has developed quite an appetite.

This becomes particularly interesting when all 12 people do not need to be there.

Most professionals know the experience. You sit quietly through 47 minutes of a meeting, wondering whether there is a reason your name appeared on the invitation. Eventually someone remembers you are there.

“Anything from your side?”

“Nothing from me.”

Excellent. Forty-seven minutes well spent.

Then there is the Slide Reader who has gathered a group of literate adults so one person can read aloud the words they are already reading.

The Late Arrival enters 12 minutes in and asks a question that requires everyone who arrived on time to hear the first 12 minutes again.

The Optional Attendee accepts because optional meetings have an uncanny ability to become mandatory once somebody important accepts.

Lunch meetings have their own etiquette.

“Feel free to eat.”

Thank you.

It is 12:15 and I was hoping someone would authorize lunch.

Then there is the parking lot. A conversation wanders too far from the agenda, so someone sensibly says, “Let's park that.” The topic is moved into an imaginary corporate parking lot where it waits until somebody schedules another meeting to retrieve it.

And just when everything appears to be ending on time, someone glances at the clock.

“I know we're at time. One last thing.”

We were so close.

Make the Meeting Earn It

The oldest criticism of meetings is that they could have been emails.

Sometimes they could have been. Sometimes an email is exactly how the 34 message hostage negotiation began.

A more useful question is this:

What needs to happen here that requires these particular people to occupy the same time together?

If 12 people simply need to receive information, we have developed several technologies capable of accomplishing that without requiring all 12 people to stare politely at one another while the information is read aloud.

Interaction is different.

Debate needs response. Ambiguity sometimes needs conversation. Relationships need actual humans. Complex decisions can improve when people hear an argument, challenge it, change their minds, and work toward an answer together.

That is where synchronous time earns its cost.

Amazon has built an interesting discipline around this distinction. The company stopped using PowerPoint for internal presentations years ago and instead uses written narratives often up to six pages. Jeff Bezos described meetings that begin with participants silently reading the memo together before discussion. Amazon's current leadership continues to describe narratives as a core working norm because they force substantive thinking onto the page.

The practice isn't remarkable because everyone should copy Amazon. Plenty of organizations would respond to a six-page memo by scheduling a meeting to discuss why the memo is six pages.

The interesting part is the entrance requirement.

Do the thinking that can happen alone before consuming the time that requires everyone together.

A meeting should probably earn the collective time it consumes.

Nobody Designed This Calendar

Meeting overload usually isn't evidence of an organization filled with people who love meetings.

It is more often the unintended result of people trying to run the organization responsibly.

A project becomes important and develops its own meeting infrastructure. First comes the working session. Then the status meeting. Eventually a steering committee appears to hear what happened in the status meeting. If the initiative becomes sufficiently important, somebody may request a readout from the steering committee.

Soon the project is producing meetings almost as efficiently as it produces deliverables.

Cross functional work adds another layer because everyone reasonably wants the right stakeholders involved. Inclusion expands. Calendars fill. Someone worries communication is slipping, which is understandable.

So, another touch base appears.

This is the odd economics of coordination. Every invitation can make sense while the resulting calendar makes no sense at all.

Meetings are individually rational and collectively expensive.

That is why asking whether a particular meeting is reasonable doesn't get us very far. Most are reasonable on paper. The harder questions are whether interaction changes the outcome, whether everyone invited needs to participate, and what would be lost if some of the work happened another way.

Coordination requires time together. Productive work often requires time apart.

Nobody chose the whole calendar.

Everybody contributed to it.

We'll Give You 12 Minutes Back

There is one final meeting ritual worth appreciating.

An hour meeting finishes at 10:48.

The leader looks at the clock, visibly pleased with this unexpected act of operational excellence.

“I think we can end there. We'll give everyone 12 minutes back.”

People smile.

Twelve minutes that already belonged to us have just been returned as though the organization found them behind the couch.

Calendars reopen. Someone gets coffee. Someone answers an email. For a fleeting moment, freedom.

Then the 11:00 meeting begins.

Somewhere right now, someone is finishing a meeting about tomorrow's meeting. Someone else is updating the deck. A third person is preparing the readout. The follow up is already on the calendar, and a Quick 15 may soon appear so everyone can align before the prep meeting.

How are we doing? Should we schedule a meeting?