Do we really need another meeting?

I don’t know how many hours of my life I’ve spent in meetings. Certainly enough to reach the conclusion, after years in IT, that the problem with meetings is often framed the wrong way. It’s easy to say: we have too many meetings. But I’ve also been in meetings that lasted half an hour and later saved several hours of work, dozens of Slack messages and misunderstandings between several people. I’ve also been in meetings after which I spent a moment wondering why I had even been there. And I think that’s exactly where the problem lies.

It’s not about how many meetings we have. It’s about whether those meetings make any sense at all.

A full calendar, an empty day

Remote work naturally brought more meetings. In the past, some things could be handled by simply walking over to someone’s desk. Now we have Teams, Meet, Zoom and the calendar. Add all the recurring parts of team work: daily, planning, retro, refinement, weekly meetings, 1:1s, technical meetings, project meetings, company meetings… Then you look at your calendar in the morning and see something like this:

• 9:00–9:30 — meeting
• 10:00–10:30 — meeting
• 11:30–12:00 — meeting
• 13:00–14:00 — meeting
• 15:00–15:30 — meeting

In theory, most of the day is free. In practice, try doing something that requires two or three hours of real concentration in a schedule like that. For a developer, a meeting also takes a little more time than the calendar shows. There is the switch out of one context, the switch into another, and then the return to whatever you were doing before. Sometimes you open your IDE after a call and stare at the code for a good while, trying to remember: “Right… what was I trying to do here?”

That’s why five short meetings scattered across the day can be more disruptive for me than one longer, focused meeting. But still, duration is not the most important thing.

Eight people, two talking

This is probably one of the most familiar scenes. Eight people are in the meeting. Two are having the conversation. One adds something from time to time. The other five sit there, half-listening, replying to messages or doing something completely different. Over the years, I’ve learned not to judge those people too quickly. Maybe they simply shouldn’t be there.

If a one-hour discussion concerns me for three minutes, it is hard to expect full attention from me for the other 57. I’ve been in that situation many times. I was invited “in case something comes up”, “because it’s technical”, or “because it’s good for you to know”. I wasn’t needed. I said nothing. Nothing from the meeting affected my work later. An hour passed. And that’s the point where I start wondering whether everyone really needed to be invited.

Inviting people just in case

I have the impression that many companies follow a rule like: “I’m not sure who we’ll need, so I’ll invite everyone.” Safe, but expensive. If we invite eight people to a one-hour meeting, organisationally it is not a “one-hour meeting”. It is eight hours of work. Of course, you cannot always calculate it one-to-one, but it is worth looking at meetings this way from time to time.

Does the topic really require eight people? Does the architect need to be there for the full hour? Does the manager need to hear every technical detail? Would a short summary after the meeting be enough for half the team?

I once heard about a daily attended by around 50 people. To this day, I don’t know whether I find it more funny or terrifying. With 50 people, even one minute per person gives you almost an hour. And if you’re person number 43, I find it hard to believe that you spend the first 42 minutes on the edge of your seat analysing everyone’s status. At that point it’s probably not a daily anymore. It’s an event.

“Since we’re all here…”

That sentence should trigger an alarm. The meeting was scheduled for an hour. After 25 minutes, the topic is finished. It looks like everyone has just got 35 minutes of their day back. And then someone says: “Since we’re all here, I have one more thing…”

It is never a small thing. A moment later, it turns out the person who should be part of the discussion is missing. Nobody prepared for it. There is no data. There is no decision. But since we’ve already started, we keep going.

Meetings seem to have a strange tendency to fill whatever amount of time we give them. If we schedule an hour, they often last an hour. If we schedule 30 minutes, there is a good chance we’ll close the topic in 30 minutes. That’s why I increasingly like shorter meetings. Not every meeting needs to last 60 minutes just because Outlook or Google Calendar happens to suggest that slot so conveniently.

An agenda doesn’t have to be a three-page document

I’m not a fan of over-formalising everything. I don’t need a document before every call with a strategic objective, an owner, success metrics and five attachments. But it would be good to at least know why we’re meeting.

An invitation called “Sync” tells me almost nothing. The same goes for “Quick call” or “Project discussion”. And if the meeting starts with: “Okay, so where do we begin?” that’s usually not a great sign.

Sometimes one sentence in the description is genuinely enough: “We want to decide whether we do X or Y and leave the meeting with one option selected.” Suddenly everyone knows why they are there. If people need to read something in advance, it is also helpful to say that early enough. Sending someone a 40-page document at 10:00 and inviting them to a 13:00 meeting with “please read before the meeting” probably doesn’t improve the quality of the discussion. It mostly raises the stress level.

Not everything needs to be discussed live

This is something I also had to learn myself. If I need to share information, I don’t always need a meeting. If I need an answer to one question, I often don’t need one either. Some things are much better handled in a message. Or a comment on a task. Or a short document. Or even a few-minute recording if someone wants to show something more complex.

A meeting has a real advantage when we actually need a conversation. When several points of view need to be discussed. When we have to make a decision. When the problem is complex enough that an exchange of 80 Slack messages becomes completely unreadable. In those situations, half an hour of conversation can be very effective.

But if one person spends 45 minutes passing information to ten other people, it is worth asking whether there really wasn’t a better way to do it.

Does the camera have to be on?

A dangerous topic. I do think a camera helps in some meetings, especially in 1:1 conversations, difficult discussions, workshops or meetings where we are genuinely talking rather than just sharing status. I can see the other person’s reaction. It is easier to notice when someone does not understand something. The conversation feels a little more natural.

That does not mean the camera should be mandatory for eight hours a day. Sitting in front of a lens from morning to evening can be tiring too, and I do not see much value in watching six faces during a meeting where one person is presenting slides. As usual, common sense is probably the answer. It’s a surprisingly underrated technology.

The meeting is over. What now?

The meetings that irritate me most are probably the ones that simply… end. We talked for an hour. Fifteen ideas came up. We changed our minds three times. Someone was supposed to check something. Someone was supposed to talk to someone else. And then everyone leaves.

Two days later, the conversation starts: “Who was actually supposed to do that?” “I thought you were.” “No, I thought it was Tomek.” And a week later we organise another meeting. It would have been enough to spend two minutes at the end asking: Okay. What did we decide? Who is doing what? By when? You really don’t need a complicated process for this. One sentence in Teams or in the task is often enough.

AI tools increasingly help with this too by preparing meeting summaries. This is one use of AI that makes a lot of sense to me. Although there is also the classic solution: recording the meeting. It has only one small problem. Almost nobody watches it later.

A few meetings everyone probably knows

Over the years, I’ve built quite a collection.

The meeting because we always have a meeting

Nothing special happened. We have no topics. But the invitation is recurring. So here we are.

The meeting about another meeting

Not everyone was at the previous one, so we need to tell them what happened. Then it turns out we actually need another meeting with the people from the first meeting.

The “since we’re already here” meeting

Described above. It usually starts innocently. It never ends that way.

The meeting that could have been a message

40 minutes. Six people. Three conclusions at the end that would easily fit into four sentences.

The ghost meeting

You join on time. Nobody is there. You wait. After a few minutes, you start checking whether you’re definitely in the right room. After ten, you begin to wonder whether the meeting exists anywhere outside your calendar.

The emergency meeting

Best scheduled on Friday afternoon. “We need to talk quickly because we have a problem.” Then everyone spends the first 20 minutes trying to establish what the problem actually is.

This isn’t about having no meetings

I wouldn’t want this article to become another “Meetings are evil” piece. They aren’t. I’ve seen genuinely good meetings. Meetings after which the problem was solved, everyone knew what to do and we could calmly get back to work. I’ve also seen meetings that saved a project from making a very bad decision. Conversation is necessary. Sometimes it is irreplaceable.

I just have the impression that we too often treat a meeting as the default way to solve every problem. We don’t know? Meeting. We can’t agree? Meeting. We need to share information? Meeting. We have too many meetings? Maybe we should organise a meeting to discuss what to do about it. And that last one is probably the meeting we should resist most strongly.