Meetings: Every One Was Reasonable. The Calendar Is Not.

A weekly meeting is set up in March to steer a system launch. The system goes live in June.

In September the meeting is still in eleven calendars, every Tuesday at ten, for an hour. Nobody decided to keep it, and nobody decided to end it. Of those two decisions, only one has ever had a mechanism.

The best documented cost in the organisation

The previous post in this arc argued that an interruption leaves no record. A meeting is the opposite case.

It has an organiser, a start time, a duration and a list of everyone who was asked. Every minute of it is written down in advance, attributed to a named person, and multiplied by the number of people in the room.

So the cost of meetings is not hidden. It sits in the calendar system, itemised, and could be totalled for any team in an afternoon.

It almost never is. That is the more interesting fact, and it needs a different explanation from the one that applied to interruption.

A way in, and no way out

A meeting is added by one person, for a reason, at a moment when the reason is true. The test it has to pass is local: whether this is worth an hour of these people's time this week. Usually it is.

Removing one is a different kind of act. Cancelling a recurring meeting says that someone's subject no longer needs the room, and declining one says something about the organiser.

Adding costs nothing socially. Removing costs something every time it is done.

So the calendar has an entry route and no exit route. Each meeting in it was reasonable when it was added, and the calendar as a whole was never proposed to anybody. It accumulated.

That is the structural point. Meeting overload is not a failure of any particular meeting. It is what happens to any system in which each addition is judged on its own and the total is judged by nobody.

The explanation the market offers

A professional whose week has filled with meetings is handed a familiar diagnosis.

You are bad at saying no. Protect your time. Be more ruthless with your diary.

The advice assumes that declining is a neutral act, and in most organisations it is not. Where attendance is read as a sign of engagement, a person who declines three meetings is not recorded as having protected their focus. They are recorded as absent.

What is being diagnosed as a personal weakness is a sensible response to an arrangement in which saying yes is free and saying no is priced. If the only way out of a meeting is individual refusal, and refusal is read as disengagement, what would it take for anyone to leave one?

The conditions that produce it

Twelve structural circumstances are associated with this signal. They fall into four groups, and none of them describes a person.

The first is growth without review. Meeting volume has grown incrementally and no one reviews the collective time it costs. Recurring meetings are never reviewed for continued necessity as the work changes, and durations are set by calendar convention rather than by what needs to be resolved.

The second is entry. Invitations default to broad attendance rather than the minimum the decision actually needs. There is no shared norm for when a meeting is the right way to resolve something, so meetings become the default channel for information that could be shared asynchronously.

The third is what happens inside. Meetings with no agenda or defined outcome expand to fill the time booked. Decisions are not recorded or actioned afterwards, so the same ground is covered again next time, and where ownership of a decision is unclear it is routed through several meetings in turn.

The fourth is what surrounds them. Meetings are scheduled without regard to the focused work they displace, and back to back scheduling leaves no gap to act on what one meeting produced before the next begins. Attendance is treated as a signal of engagement, so declining carries a cost.

Two things stand out. A meeting that records no decision generates the next meeting, so part of the load is produced by the load itself. And the last circumstance is the one that holds the others in place, because it closes the only exit the individual has.

What tends to relieve it, and who has to agree

The conditions associated with relief are structural, and they divide cleanly.

Four are within reach of one person. Blocking focused time in the calendar before meetings take it, so it is protected by default rather than by exception. Asking for an agenda and a defined outcome before accepting, so a meeting without one is visible as such.

Declining or delegating where the role is not one the decision needs, and saying why. Naming the collective time a recurring commitment costs at the point it is proposed.

None of the four is refusal. Each works by making something visible: the missing agenda, the unstated cost, the reason for an absence. That is a different instrument from saying no, and a safer one in an organisation that reads absence as a statement.

The other nine require somebody else.

A shared norm on when a meeting is the right channel. Recurring meetings reviewed for continued necessity. Invitations narrowed to the people the decision needs.

Decisions recorded and actioned. Information shared asynchronously where the outcome would be the same. Durations set by what needs resolving rather than by convention.

Ownership assigned when a decision is travelling through several meetings. Gaps between meetings, so that what one produces can be acted on before the next. And the collective load reviewed against the work it displaces.

Almost every item on that second list is an exit route: a review, a narrowing, a norm that allows a meeting not to happen. They are the mechanisms the calendar was built without.

What a leader sees, and what the data is used for

The professional sees their own week. What they cannot see is whether the same five people sit in every meeting, whether three separate meetings are circling one decision, or whether Tuesday at ten has outlived the project it was set up for.

A leader can see that, in principle. They are the only party positioned to audit a team's schedule for necessity, attendee fit and time cost, to narrow invitations to the people who genuinely need to be there, and to replace a share of the load with asynchronous communication where the result would be the same. They can review recurring meetings as the work evolves, and agree a norm for which decisions and conversations actually require a meeting.

They also hold something the individual does not.

When a leader cancels a meeting it reads as a decision. When anyone else declines one it reads as a withdrawal. The exit route missing at the level of the individual exists at the level of the team, and it is the one the advice to individuals never mentions.

The obstacle is not a lack of data, because the calendar holds all of it. Where that data is analysed at all, it tends to be analysed by person: who attends most, who responds fastest, who is most connected.

That is a reading of people. The reading that would help is a reading of meetings: which have outlived their purpose, which are carrying a decision nobody owns, and how much focused time the whole arrangement consumes each week.

Opinion: A Calendar Is a Budget Nobody Holds

Our position is that meeting overload is an accumulation problem rather than a discipline problem. Each meeting is added by someone with a reason, and the total belongs to nobody.

An arrangement in which additions are cheap and removals are costly will grow whatever the intentions of the people inside it. Advising individuals to decline more often treats a missing exit route as a personal shortcoming.

The cost is not only the hours. A decision that returns to next week's agenda has to be thought through twice, and the gap that used to sit between meetings was where the thinking a meeting asked for actually got done.

A calendar that has lost both consumes the capacity it was convened to use. The loss appears later, as a capable person who no longer seems to get anything substantial done.

The provocation we would leave open is a simple check. Every organisation has a way of adding a meeting, and almost everyone in it knows how to use it.

It is worth finding out whether the same organisation has a way of ending one, and when anyone last used it.

Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process:
The author made use of Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies in the preparation of this post.

The contents of this article are for informational purposes only and do not constitute professional, legal, or financial advice.