Why Your Calendar is Killing Your Productivity
If I had a dollar for every meeting I’ve attended that achieved absolutely nothing, I could retire to the Byron Bay tomorrow.
Australian businesses are literally talking themselves out of getting work done.
Walking through any business district between 10 AM and 4 PM, you’ll see the same thing: empty desks and full meeting rooms.
That’s not including the opportunity cost of what doesn’t get done while everyone’s sitting around a table discussing things that could be resolved in a five-minute conversation. The meeting culture has become so entrenched that people feel guilty when they’re not in meetings. I’ve had managers tell me they don’t feel productive unless their calendar is completely booked with back-to-back sessions.
We’ve created a culture where being busy is more important than being useful.
What most managers refuse to acknowledge: the majority of them are just performance anxiety disguised as collaboration.
Remember that last “touch base” you sat through. How much actual strategic thinking happened? How many new ideas emerged?
I’ll bet the first twenty minutes were spent on updates, the middle section was dominated by one or two people, and the final portion was a rushed attempt to assign actions that were probably unnecessary in the first place.
This isn’t collaboration – it’s group therapy for leaders who can’t make decisions outside of a formal setting. It’s management theatre, performed for an audience of captive colleagues.
Let me tell you about the worst meeting I ever experienced.
I watched a operations group spend forty minutes in a meeting discussing why their previous meeting had run overtime.
The first meeting ran for ninety minutes. The agenda covered fifteen different projects, most of which only involved some people in the room. By the end, everyone knew a little bit about everything, but nobody had the time to actually work on anything.
Within a month, they were having meetings to plan meetings, and follow-up meetings to discuss what was covered in the previous meetings. The project delays got worse, not better. The irony was completely lost on them. They genuinely couldn’t see that the meeting about meetings was the exact problem they were trying to solve.
Digital meetings have removed the natural barriers that used to limit how often we got together.
In the old days, you had to book a room, coordinate schedules, and physically gather people. That friction meant you only called meetings when they were genuinely necessary.
I’ve seen departments where it’s literally impossible to find a half-day block of uninterrupted time in anyone’s calendar.
The result? Meeting proliferation. What used to be a brief discussion is now a video conference with action items. Every day is fragmented into thirty-minute chunks between different sessions.
Here’s the part that really gets me fired up: the assumption that more collaboration automatically leads to better results.
Sometimes the best thing you can do for a project is leave people alone to actually work on it.
There’s a reason why the most groundbreaking companies – think Netflix in their early days – were famous for small teams.
Every concept needed to be presented in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was safe work that had been committee-approved into blandness. The innovative solutions died in the endless discussion cycles.
Genius doesn’t happen in conference rooms full of stakeholders.
The meeting industrial complex has its own vocabulary designed to make everything sound important.
“Let’s circle back on this” – translation: “I haven’t thought this through, but I don’t want to look unprepared.”
{{“{Let’s get everyone in a room|We need all the stakeholders aligned|This requires a cross-functional approach}” – translation: “I’m afraid to make a decision, so let’s spread the responsibility around.”|The phrase “let’s unpack this” makes me want to {scream|lose my mind|run for the hills}.}}
“Let’s schedule a follow-up” – translation: “Nothing will actually change, but we’ll create the illusion of progress through scheduling.” It’s become corporate speak for “let’s turn a simple issue into an hour-long discussion that resolves nothing.”
But here’s where I’ll probably lose some people: most “collaborative” meetings are actually destructive to real teamwork.
Real creative work happens in focused spaces where professionals can think deeply without the pressure of speaking up for an audience.
Collaboration isn’t sitting in a room brainstorming from scratch – it’s capable professionals bringing their best thinking to a time-limited discussion. The meetings that actually work are the ones where people come ready, not the ones where they come to figure things out together.
How do you fix a meeting-addicted organisation?
Introduce friction back into the meeting process.
The most productive organisations I work with have strict rules: no meeting without a defined outcome, no recurring meetings without regular review, and no meetings longer than forty-five minutes without a compelling reason.
Some teams assign a dollar cost to meetings based on the hourly rates of attendees. When you see that your “quick sync” is costing $1,200 per hour, you start to think differently about whether it’s necessary. The quality improvements are usually dramatic.
Separate communication from collaboration.
The majority of meeting time is wasted on information that could be shared more effectively through reports.
The meetings that justify their time are the ones focused on creative challenges that require immediate feedback. Everything else – status reports – should happen through asynchronous channels.
I worked with a professional services company that replaced their weekly progress reviews with a simple online dashboard. Meeting time dropped by 60%, and project communication actually improved. Everyone can see what’s happening without sitting through verbal updates.
Stop treating inclusion as the highest virtue.
The best executives I know are strategic about who they consult in different types of decisions.
Stakeholder engagement is important for strategic changes, but not every choice requires group consensus. Most operational decisions should be made by the individuals closest to the work. They understand that additional voices isn’t always useful perspectives.
The number that made me realise how broken meeting culture really is:
Measure the proportion of time spent in meetings compared to actual output.
I’ve consulted with companies where people were working weekends to complete tasks because their normal working hours were consumed by discussions.
Sometimes the ratio is even worse. High-performing companies flip this ratio. They spend minimal time in meetings and extensive time on implementation. The talking serves the doing, not the other way around.
That’s not efficiency – it’s organisational failure.
Why are people so addicted to meetings?
There’s also a safety in meetings. If you’re in meetings all day, you can’t be held accountable for not producing work.
Actually doing work is often individual, risky, and doesn’t provide the same visible feedback as leading a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your productivity, even if they don’t create results.
Don’t get me wrong – some meetings are absolutely necessary.
The discussions that work are focused, well-prepared, and outcome-driven. They bring together the necessary participants to make decisions that require immediate input.
Everything else is just social performance that consumes the time and energy that could be directed on actual work. They’re strategic about when to use them, disciplined about how to run them, and honest about whether they’re valuable.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned about meetings?
Good meetings solve problems permanently rather than creating ongoing consultation cycles.
Ineffective meetings multiply like cancer cells.
Design your meeting culture to support work, not replace it.
The future of business success depends on it.
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