I sat in a meeting once that took a full hour, pulled in several people, and produced nothing — nothing that a two-line message couldn't have conveyed, nothing decided, nothing made. We talked, we "aligned," we nodded, and everyone left with the pleasant sensation of having collaborated, of having been productive, of having moved something forward. But nothing had actually moved. The information shared could have been an email. The decision that needed making didn't get made, just discussed. And the hour — multiplied across everyone in the room — was simply gone, converted into the feeling of progress without any of the substance of it. It was, like so many meetings, a performance of work standing in for the work itself.
The reflexive meeting is one of the most expensive habits in professional life, and it's expensive precisely because it feels productive. Scheduling a meeting feels like taking action, like being on top of things, like collaboration and alignment and momentum. But most meetings produce far less than they cost, and a huge share of them accomplish nothing that couldn't have been handled faster and better in writing — the notorious "meeting that should have been an email." The feeling of productivity a meeting provides is largely disconnected from its actual output, which is why we keep scheduling them: they reliably deliver the sensation of progress whether or not they deliver any.
Here's the sharper version of the claim, though: meetings aren't just often unnecessary — they're frequently where work goes to avoid being done. A meeting is often easier than the hard thing it's ostensibly about. Making a decision is hard and risky; having a meeting to "discuss" the decision is easy and feels productive while deferring the actual deciding. Doing the work is hard; meeting about the work feels like progress while postponing it. And a meeting diffuses responsibility across everyone present, so no single person has to own the decision or the outcome — the group talked about it, which feels safer than anyone deciding it. Meetings let us feel busy and collaborative while avoiding the harder, lonelier work of deciding and doing.
I'm not saying all meetings are bad, or that nothing should ever be discussed live — some things genuinely require a meeting, and I'll get to how to tell. I'm saying the reflexive default to meetings, the scheduling of a meeting as the automatic response to almost anything, is enormously costly and often a way of avoiding real work while feeling productive. Here's why we default to meetings, why most of them are theater, what they actually cost, and when a meeting is genuinely worth having.
Key Takeaways
- The reflexive meeting is expensive and feels productive. Scheduling a meeting feels like action and collaboration, while most meetings produce far less than they cost.
- Most meetings could be a message. A huge share accomplish nothing that couldn't be handled faster and better in writing — the meeting that should have been an email.
- Meetings are often where work goes to avoid being done. Discussing a decision is easier than making it; meeting about the work feels like progress while postponing it; and a meeting diffuses responsibility so no one has to own the call.
- The cost is hidden and huge. Multiply the hours by the people, add the way meetings fragment focus and prevent deep work, and the reflexive meeting is one of the most expensive things an organization does.
- Some meetings are genuinely worth it. Real-time discussion, complex decisions needing back-and-forth, sensitive conversations, and relationship-building justify a meeting. The test is whether it truly needs to be synchronous.
Why We Default to Meetings
It's worth understanding why the meeting is the automatic response, because the pull is strong and mostly unexamined. The first reason is that meetings feel like progress. Scheduling one feels like taking action on something — you've done something about the issue by putting a meeting on the calendar, even though you've only deferred it to a future hour of talking. The act of scheduling provides the satisfying sensation of having addressed the thing, which is why "let's set up a meeting" is such a reflexive response: it feels productive in the moment, regardless of whether the meeting will produce anything.
The second reason is that meetings feel collaborative and safe. Bringing people together to "align" and "discuss" feels like good, inclusive practice, and it spreads the weight of whatever's being decided across the group. This is the diffusion of responsibility: in a meeting, no single person has to own the decision, because the group discussed it, which feels safer than one person deciding and being accountable. A meeting lets everyone participate in a decision without anyone having to make it, which is comfortable precisely because it avoids individual accountability.
And the third reason is the deepest: meetings are often easier than the alternative. Making a decision alone is hard and exposing; doing focused work is hard and effortful. A meeting to discuss the decision, or to talk about the work, is easier than either, while still feeling productive — so we reach for the meeting not despite it being easier than the real work, but because it is. The reflexive meeting isn't just a scheduling habit; it's frequently an avoidance mechanism dressed as diligence, a way to feel like we're addressing something hard while actually stepping around it.
Why Most Meetings Are Theater
Once you see meetings clearly, a lot of them are revealed as performance — the appearance of work rather than the substance. A meeting that merely shares information that could have been written down is theater: it converts a two-minute read into an hour of everyone's time, delivering the same information less efficiently while feeling more collaborative. A meeting to "align" that's really just everyone hearing themselves talk, reaching no decision and producing no action, is theater. A meeting held because it's the recurring weekly slot, regardless of whether there's anything that needs meeting about, is pure ritual. In all these cases, the meeting feels like work and isn't; it's a performance of collaboration standing in for the thing collaboration is supposed to produce.
This is the same pattern that shows up wherever the appearance of substance replaces the substance itself — the polished discovery call that surfaces nothing, the impressive strategy deck that's admired and ignored. Meetings are another venue where the performance of productivity can fully replace productivity, and where everyone leaves feeling good about work that didn't happen. [BACKLINK PLACEHOLDER → suggestion: internal link to article #43, why the discovery call is mostly performance / the appearance of substance replacing substance] The tell is the same: a meeting that produces a genuine decision or a real, otherwise-impossible exchange did something; a meeting that produces only the feeling of alignment and a vague sense of progress did not, however good it felt in the room.
The reason this theater persists is that its emptiness is invisible in the moment. Everyone leaves a meeting feeling like something happened, because talking for an hour feels like something happened, and nobody audits whether the meeting actually produced anything a message couldn't have. The feeling of productivity masks the absence of it, which is exactly why the reflexive meeting survives — it reliably delivers the feeling, and the feeling is what gets noticed, not the missing output.
The Hidden Cost
The reason all this matters is that meetings are far more expensive than they appear, and the expense is mostly hidden. The obvious cost is the raw time — but even that is routinely underestimated, because a meeting's cost isn't one hour, it's one hour multiplied by everyone in it. A one-hour meeting with six people isn't an hour; it's six hours of human time, and reckoned that way, the reflexive meeting is revealed as enormously costly, especially when much of that multiplied time produces nothing.
But the deeper cost is what meetings do to focus and deep work. Meetings fragment the day, breaking it into small pieces separated by interruptions, and focused, valuable work requires uninterrupted stretches that a meeting-broken calendar destroys. A day with three scattered meetings isn't a day with a few hours of meetings and the rest free; it's a day with no usable blocks of deep-work time at all, because the meetings have chopped it into fragments too small to do real work in. So meetings don't just consume their own time; they poison the time around them, preventing the deep work that actually produces things — which is why a calendar full of meetings correlates with a strange feeling of being constantly busy while producing very little. [BACKLINK PLACEHOLDER → suggestion: internal link to article #48, how to make a month of content in a day / focus and the cost of context-switching and fragmentation] The reflexive meeting habit doesn't just waste the meeting hours; it wastes the surrounding hours too, by making deep work impossible.
Add the multiplied time to the destroyed focus, and the reflexive meeting is plausibly one of the most expensive habits an organization has — and it's paid, like most reflexive-urgency and over-doing costs, invisibly, in the work that never got done because everyone was in meetings feeling productive. [BACKLINK PLACEHOLDER → suggestion: internal link to article #53, most of your urgent deadlines aren't real / the hidden costs paid invisibly]
🎬 Embed a short breakdown of a meeting's true cost — hours times people, plus the fragmented focus around it — versus the same information or decision handled async.
When a Meeting Is Actually Worth It
To be fair and accurate: some things genuinely warrant a meeting, and the goal isn't zero meetings but the right ones. Meetings are genuinely valuable when the interaction truly needs to be synchronous — when there's real back-and-forth discussion required, a complex decision that benefits from live, dynamic exchange, a problem that needs multiple people thinking together in real time. They're valuable for sensitive conversations that shouldn't happen in writing, for building relationships and trust that genuinely benefit from human presence, and sometimes for the kind of live brainstorming whose energy comes from being together. These are real uses, and for them a meeting is the right tool, not a waste.
The test for whether a meeting is worth it is simple: does this genuinely require synchronous, real-time interaction, or is it information or a decision that could be handled asynchronously? If the answer is that it's really just information being shared, or a decision one person could make and communicate, or a status update that could be written, it should be a message or a document, not a meeting. If it genuinely needs live, dynamic, multi-person interaction — real discussion, complex live decision-making, sensitive human conversation — a meeting earns its place. Most reflexive meetings fail this test, which is why most of them should have been emails; but the ones that pass it are worth having, and worth having well. The point isn't to eliminate meetings; it's to make them earn their enormous cost by being the genuinely synchronous things only a meeting can do.
