Everyone complains about meetings and almost nobody cancels one, because the cost is spread across other people’s calendars while the benefit lands on yours. An hour with eight people in it is a working day, and it never appears on any budget.
There is a test that sorts the necessary meetings from the rest, and it works because it asks about the output rather than the topic.
The test
A meeting is justified when the output cannot be produced by one person alone.
That is the whole rule. Applied honestly it splits almost every invitation into two piles.
Things that genuinely need people in a room: making a decision where the trade-offs are contested, resolving a disagreement that has already failed to resolve in writing, working something out where nobody yet knows the answer, and conversations where tone matters more than content — feedback, conflict, bad news.
Things that do not: status updates, information broadcast, decisions one person is going to make anyway, and any meeting whose agenda is a list of items rather than a question.
If you can write down what you want people to know, it is an email. If you need to find out what they think and the answer will change what happens, it is a meeting.
The status meeting is the biggest single offender
The recurring meeting where everyone says what they did last week is almost always a broadcast wearing a meeting’s clothes. Eight people each spend an hour to transmit two minutes of information that six of them did not need.
The written version takes each person five minutes, is searchable afterwards, and can be read by someone who was on holiday. The usual objection — that people will not read it — is true only when nothing in it ever affects anyone, which is itself the diagnosis.
If a status meeting has genuine value, it is usually in the two minutes where someone says they are stuck. That is a much smaller meeting than the one currently in the calendar.
Three questions before you send the invitation
What decision comes out of this? If there isn’t one, and there isn’t a problem to work through, you are holding a broadcast. Write it instead.
Who actually changes their behaviour as a result? Those people are required. Everyone else is optional, and should be told so explicitly, because “optional” on an invitation is widely understood to mean “mandatory, but we are being polite.”
What would happen if it didn’t take place? If the honest answer is “we would find out anyway, slightly later,” that is a reasonable answer.
Make the answer visible in the invitation
Put the decision to be made in the title, not the topic. “Decide: launch date for the pilot” tells eight people whether they need to be there. “Pilot sync” tells them nothing, so they all come.
The meeting that should have been an email, in reverse
The failure runs both ways, and the opposite error is less discussed and more expensive.
Some conversations should never be conducted in writing. Anything where someone might feel criticised, anything with genuine disagreement, and anything sensitive enough that people will read tone into punctuation. A long email thread trying to resolve a conflict usually creates a second conflict about the thread.
The signal is a thread that is getting longer without getting closer. Once a discussion passes about three rounds without converging, writing has stopped being the efficient medium — the disagreement is about something the messages are not addressing, and ten minutes of conversation will find it.
If you are stuck in someone else’s meeting
You often cannot cancel a meeting you did not schedule. Two things still work.
Ask, in advance and in writing, what the meeting needs from you. It is a reasonable question, it is hard to answer for a meeting with no purpose, and asking it sometimes causes the meeting to improve or evaporate.
Decline the ones where the honest answer is “nothing”, and say why in one sentence. This is easier at some workplaces than others, and in the UK the guidance on reasonable working practices published by Acas is a useful backstop if meeting load has become a genuine workload problem rather than an irritation — sustained overload is something the Health and Safety Executive treats as a management responsibility, not a personal failing.
What to do instead
The written status update, sent on a fixed day, read by whoever needs it.
The decision made by the person accountable for it, announced with the reasoning, with an invitation to object rather than a meeting to approve.
The fifteen-minute conversation with the two people who actually disagree, instead of the hour with eight people watching them disagree.
And the meeting that genuinely needs to happen, with the decision in the title, the right four people in it, and everyone else reading the outcome afterwards.
More on getting through the day in Work & Productivity, and there is a related piece on notifications worth turning off at work.
