The 3 Reasons You Have Too Many Meetings
Unearthing the root cause behind our collective meeting burnout
“Too many meetings!”
Whether you’re working from home or from the office, the complaint is the same. It’s not just a matter of Zoom fatigue — though yes, online meetings are more exhausting than in-person meetings. It’s that we’ve taken a business culture that was already overloaded with meetings, and piled on even more, as if a never-ending series of individual and group calls can somehow make up for the loss of conversations that used to happen spontaneously at the office.
This is not a problem we can cure by simply returning to the central workplace, or by paring our current call volume back to something more like what we had in the olden days of office life. Meeting culture was broken long before Covid; we were just so accustomed to booked-up calendars that our complaints were held at the level of a grumble rather than a roar.
Fair enough, because when you’re at the office, the opportunity costs of a meeting are relatively low: If you pass up a meeting in order to get a quiet hour of work done at your desk, someone will probably interrupt you anyhow. So embrace the non-stop calendar invitations on your days at the office, and get your work done around the boardroom table. In fact, that’s a…
