We Have a Meeting About the Meeting

There are few phrases in business more terrifying than:

“Let’s schedule a quick meeting.”

Because we all know what “quick” means.

Someone finds an open 30-minute block on the calendar. Eight people get invited. Three aren't really sure why they're there. Two are answering email. One is doing actual work on another monitor.

And somewhere around minute 24, somebody says:

“I think we probably need another meeting to work through this.”

Congratulations.

We have successfully held a meeting about the meeting.

And somehow, nobody finds this particularly unusual anymore.

I Don't Hate Meetings

Let me get something out of the way.

I don't hate meetings.

A good meeting can accomplish something in 20 minutes that might otherwise take three days of emails, messages, phone calls, misunderstandings, and people working from different versions of the truth.

Put the right people together. Define the problem. Talk it through. Make a decision. Decide who's doing what. Go do the work.

That's a useful meeting.

And there is some evidence that meetings really do have value.

A 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research study involving more than 9,000 workers found that meetings consumed roughly 12% of working hours and 14% of company wage costs. That's a significant investment.

But the researchers also found something important: meetings weren't simply wasted time. Planning, problem-solving, information sharing, project coordination, and learning from colleagues were among the reasons meetings provided value.

So maybe meetings are not the problem.

The problem begins when having the meeting becomes confused with accomplishing something.

Those are not the same thing.

“Thanks for the Update”

Here's one I've experienced more times than I'd like to admit.

You have an operations update coming up.

So you spend an hour—sometimes considerably longer—pulling together a deck.

You collect the numbers.

Update the charts.

Write the bullets.

Make sure everything is formatted.

Double-check the information.

Then the meeting arrives.

You spend 15 minutes presenting everything you just spent an hour preparing.

You finish.

Silence.

No questions.

No discussion.

No decision.

No action items.

Finally somebody says:

“Thanks for the update.”

And everybody moves on to the next person.

At some point you have to ask:

Was that update actually needed?

If nobody has a question, is the information relevant?

If nobody offers feedback, was feedback expected?

If no decision comes from the presentation, did we need to present it?

Or has this simply become another weekly event on the calendar that everybody attends because everybody attended it last week?

That's an uncomfortable question because sometimes the answer is:

We're having the meeting because we have the meeting.

The Meeting Actually Started an Hour Earlier

There's another part of that operations update that's easy to miss.

The meeting wasn't 15 minutes long.

For the person presenting, it may have been an hour and fifteen minutes.

Maybe two hours.

The preparation counts.

So does the time everyone else spends preparing their portion.

Then add every person attending the meeting.

A one-hour meeting with eight people isn't really a one-hour investment.

It's eight employee-hours before you count preparation.

And then there is the interruption itself.

The ten minutes beforehand when you don't start something because you have a meeting coming up.

The time afterward trying to remember what you were working on.

The work that gets pushed until later because the middle of the day has been chopped into 30- and 60-minute pieces.

Microsoft's research has repeatedly pointed to this problem. In its Work Trend research, 68% of people said they didn't have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday. More recent Microsoft telemetry found some workers being interrupted by a meeting, email, or message roughly every two minutes during core working hours.

That's a lot of starting, stopping, remembering, and restarting.

And a poorly run meeting can keep costing time even after it ends. Research published by Harvard Business Review in 2025 described “meeting hangovers”—the lingering frustration or mental distraction from a bad meeting that can reduce engagement and productivity afterward.

Meetings aren't free simply because they don't appear on an expense report.

Could the Meeting Be Asynchronous?

This is where I think we sometimes make the meeting question too binary.

Meeting or no meeting.

There is a third option:

Maybe the communication doesn't have to happen at the same time.

An operations update could be an email.

It could be a written weekly update.

It could live inside the project-management system.

It could be an automatic check-in.

This is one area where I think 37signals—the company behind Basecamp—has an interesting approach.

Their philosophy is essentially:

Real-time sometimes. Asynchronous most of the time.

At 37signals, Basecamp automatically asks employees questions such as:

“What did you work on today?”

and, on Mondays:

“What will you be working on this week?”

There is more structure to it than simply posting whenever somebody feels like it. Their employee handbook sets expectations around participation. Daily check-ins are expected at least twice a week, and the weekly check-in is expected every week.

But here's the part I find interesting.

The answers don't require everyone to stop working at the same time and sit through a status meeting.

They're written down.

People can read them when it makes sense.

Their current handbook also organizes daily and weekly check-ins by department. You're subscribed to your team's updates and can subscribe to other teams if they're useful to you.

If it matters to what you're doing, read it.

If it doesn't, you don't have to consume every update happening throughout the company.

And because the information is written down, it remains available.

If you were out of the office, you can catch up.

If you need the information three days later, it's still there.

If six months from now someone asks, “Whatever happened with that project?” there is something to go back and reference.

That's considerably different from a status meeting where the information disappears the moment everyone leaves the room.

37signals isn't arguing that people should never talk in real time, either. Their handbook specifically acknowledges that there are times when a ping, video call, screen share, or face-to-face conversation is more efficient.

That's an important distinction.

Async isn't the goal. Effective communication is the goal.

Sometimes that's written.

Sometimes it's a meeting.

The trick is knowing which one you're dealing with.

Apparently We're Not Alone

Research from organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg and Otter.ai asked more than 600 workers to examine their own calendars.

Workers reported spending about 18 hours a week in meetings and said they could skip almost six of those hours—as long as they were kept informed about what happened.

That's almost one-third.

That doesn't mean one-third of every company's meetings should immediately disappear.

But it does suggest something worth considering:

People may not need to attend nearly as much information as organizations currently require them to.

Maybe they just need access to it.

That's a very different thing.

“Can You Send Me That Information?”

There is a special kind of pain reserved for this situation.

You attend a meeting.

A topic is discussed.

The information is presented.

Everyone is there.

Then later that day—or sometimes ten minutes later—a coworker who attended the same meeting asks:

“Can you send me the information on that?”

The information we just covered?

In the meeting you attended?

That one?

This is where we have to acknowledge something else:

Attendance does not equal communication.

Putting information in front of somebody doesn't mean they absorbed it.

Sitting in the meeting doesn't mean they were engaged.

Maybe they were answering email.

Maybe they were thinking about the meeting they had immediately afterward.

Maybe the information wasn't relevant to them at that moment.

Or maybe there were twelve other updates and yours disappeared somewhere around number seven.

Which raises another uncomfortable question:

If people need the information later anyway, would a searchable written update have served them better in the first place?

Please Don't Read the Slides to Me

Then we have the presentation meeting.

The slide appears.

There are six bullets on it.

And the presenter begins:

Bullet number one...

Then reads it.

Bullet number two.

Reads that one too.

And so on.

I know how to read.

If the purpose of the meeting is for you to read a PowerPoint presentation to me, send me the PowerPoint presentation.

I'll read it.

Probably faster.

A presentation should support the conversation.

It shouldn't be the conversation.

And while we're talking about PowerPoint, if you've managed to fit three paragraphs, a chart, four footnotes, eight bullets, and a mission statement onto one slide, I'm probably not listening to you anyway.

I'm trying to figure out what the slide is supposed to be telling me.

Slides should help make something clearer.

When they require their own table of contents, we've probably gone too far.

“I Just Wanted Everyone on the Same Page”

Fair enough.

Sometimes everybody really does need to be on the same page.

But sometimes what we need is a paragraph.

Or an email.

Or a shared document.

Or an asynchronous check-in.

Or a five-minute phone call between two people instead of a 60-minute meeting involving twelve.

Technology has made communication incredibly easy.

Unfortunately, it has also made inviting twelve people to a meeting incredibly easy.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Send invitation.

Your problem is solved.

Twelve other calendars now have a problem.

The “Just in Case” Invitation

Someone gets invited because they might know something.

Or they might need to hear something.

Or somebody might ask them a question.

So we invite them “just in case.”

That's how a meeting requiring three people becomes a meeting involving eleven.

Here's a radical idea:

If we need someone later, we can ask them later.

They don't need to sit quietly through 47 minutes of discussion waiting for the possibility that someone might ask them about a spreadsheet.

Attendance shouldn't be an insurance policy.

Invite the people required to accomplish the purpose of the meeting.

Everybody else probably has something better to do.

Putting the Meeting Online Doesn't Fix the Meeting

And none of this magically gets better because the conference room has been replaced by Zoom or Teams.

A bad meeting in person is still a bad meeting online.

It just has a mute button.

We sometimes treat virtual meetings as though they cost less because nobody had to walk down the hall, find a conference room, or drive somewhere.

But the real cost was never the conference room.

It's people's time.

Ten people sitting in ten different places for an unnecessary one-hour meeting is still ten hours of people's time.

And because starting an online meeting is so easy, we may actually be tempted to schedule more of them.

No room to reserve.

No chairs to find.

No travel.

Just find an open square on everyone's calendar and click Teams Meeting.

The same rules should apply whether we're sitting around a conference table or staring at twelve little rectangles on a screen.

Why are we here?

Who actually needs to be here?

Does this require a conversation?

What are we trying to accomplish?

Could this have been communicated another way?

And while we're at it, forcing everyone to stare into a camera for an hour doesn't suddenly make an unnecessary meeting productive.

A green camera icon isn't engagement any more than sitting in a conference-room chair is engagement.

The technology changed.

The purpose of a meeting didn't.

Status Meetings Deserve Special Attention

There is one particular species of meeting worth examining:

The status meeting.

Everyone goes around the room explaining what they're working on.

Monday morning.

Same people.

Same time.

Same conference room—or these days, maybe the same Teams link.

Same order.

“Here's what I did last week.”

“Here's what I'm doing this week.”

“Here's what's blocking me.”

Sometimes that's useful.

But if the exact same information could exist in your project-management system, CRM, shared document, Teams channel, Basecamp project, or weekly update, what exactly are we doing?

Reading the software out loud?

A status meeting should exist because conversation is needed, not because Monday arrived.

If something is off track, let's talk about it.

If a decision needs to be made, let's make it.

If somebody needs help, let's solve the problem.

But if everything is fine?

Maybe everybody gets 30 minutes of their life back.

Maybe Meetings Should Have to Earn Their Way Onto the Calendar

We scrutinize expenses.

We question software subscriptions.

We negotiate vendor contracts.

We ask employees to justify purchases.

But someone can put twelve people into a recurring one-hour meeting every Tuesday for the next year with a couple of mouse clicks.

Nobody calculates the cost.

Nobody asks whether we're still getting value from it six months later.

It just keeps happening.

Maybe meetings should have to earn their way onto the calendar.

Not with some elaborate approval process.

Please don't create a meeting committee to solve the meeting problem.

Just ask a few questions:

Why are we meeting?

Why does this need to happen synchronously?

Who actually needs to participate?

What should be different when we're finished?

If those questions have good answers, schedule the meeting.

The Practical Operator Answer

Meetings aren't bad.

Meetings without a purpose are bad.

The research actually reinforces that distinction.

Meetings can help people plan, solve problems, coordinate work, make decisions, and learn from one another.

Those are good reasons to meet.

But information doesn't always require a meeting.

An update doesn't always require a presentation.

A recurring calendar invitation isn't proof that something remains valuable.

And putting 15 people in the same room—or 15 little boxes on a screen—doesn't automatically create communication.

Sometimes the better answer is asynchronous.

Write the update.

Post the check-in.

Send the email.

Make the phone call.

Give people somewhere to find the information when they actually need it.

And when a meeting is necessary, use it for the things meetings are actually good at:

Discussing. Deciding. Solving. Creating.

Not reading.

Not reporting for the sake of reporting.

And certainly not spending an hour preparing a presentation so you can hear:

“Thanks for the update.”

Before you send the next calendar invitation, ask yourself one final question:

Does this need to be a meeting?

If the answer is yes, make it worthwhile.

If the answer is no, don't schedule it.

Because sometimes the most productive meeting you'll have all week is the one you decide not to have.

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Research & Further Reading

• David J. Deming, Katrine V. Løken, Alexander Willén & Yaling Xu — “Meetings,” National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2026.
• Microsoft — Work Trend Index, research on focus time, communication load, interruptions, and the modern workday.
• Brent N. Reed, Steven G. Rogelberg, Rebecca Hinds & Jon Gray — “The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers,”Harvard Business Review, February 2025.
• Steven G. Rogelberg / Otter.ai — research on unnecessary meeting attendance and meeting load.
• 37signals — The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication and Employee Handbook — How We Work, documenting the company's asynchronous communication practices and Basecamp Automatic Check-ins.