Meetings: Make Them Shorter or Make Them Disappear

Right now, as you listen, there’s a decent chance a meeting is on your calendar that doesn’t need to exist. Atlassian found knowledge workers lose roughly a full workweek every month to useless meetings. So here’s the question: what if the most productive meeting is the one you cancel?

Here’s the twist: the problem isn’t just how *many* meetings you have—it’s how casually they get created. One vague calendar invite can quietly turn into a weekly time tax for ten people. No one really decides to spend a chunk of their week this way; it just… accretes, like digital dust on your schedule. And because everyone’s calendar already looks crowded, we answer complexity with the laziest possible move: “Let’s book 30 minutes.”

But research on high-performing teams points in a different direction. They treat meetings like scarce budget, not default behavior. They make ruthless choices about *which* conversations deserve live time, *who* truly needs to be there, and *when* real-time discussion beats async updates. This shift—from automatic acceptance to deliberate design—is where your calendar (and your brain) start to breathe again.