Long before Outlook calendar invitations and ‘’quick catch-ups’’, meetings were necessary for survival. Photo: File.
Meetings once helped humans survive. Now they steal time, repeat emails, and end without actions. James Mason asks why we have so many — and whether we really need them.
There is a specific walk every office worker knows: Along corridors, laptop under one arm, notebook you won’t open under the other, lanyard swinging like a badge of quiet resignation.
You are not walking towards progress; you are walking away from your busy desk so someone can read aloud information you already received yesterday.
Long before Outlook calendar invitations and ‘’quick catch-ups’’, meetings were necessary for survival.
Early human societies — hunter-gatherers, tribes, farming communities — relied on coming together to solve urgent problems.
How do we survive winter? What do we do if crops fail? Where do we hunt next? Who upset the mammoths?
These weren’t ‘’optional syncs’’; they were life-or-death collaboration sessions. If they failed, the meeting participants froze, starved, or got eaten. Suddenly, attending a ‘’could’ve been an email’’ meeting feels less noble.
At its core, a modern work meeting is meant to do three simple things: identify a problem, bring the right people together, and leave with clear actions.
What all too often happens is that a group of mildly stressed humans enters a room, ideas are thrown around like paper aeroplanes, one brave soul volunteers to “take that away”, and everyone else escapes.
The problem starts when the meeting has no decision-maker, the wrong people are invited, everyone speaks, no-one owns anything and “let’s circle back” becomes a lifestyle.
At that point, collaboration turns into corporate theatre. Some meetings genuinely changed the world.
There is the case of Julius Caesar and the Roman Senate, where decisions were made that shaped an empire and occasionally ended careers — permanently.
Or Napoleon Bonaparte and his war councils — strategy meetings with real consequences, not follow-up emails.
Or Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet — fierce debate, conflicting views, actual leadership. No-one said: “Let’s book another meeting to discuss next steps.”
In contrast, many modern organisations hold meetings to look busy, avoid decisions, spread accountability so thin that no-one can be blamed, or fill calendars so work can’t interrupt meetings.
If a meeting exists to share information, provide updates, read slides aloud or ask questions that could be typed, then quite simply it could have been done by email. Here’s some uncomfortable data.
The average office employee spends 31 to 62 hours per month in meetings; middle managers spend up to 35 per cent of their time in meetings, while senior leaders can spend more than 50 per cent of their working week in meetings. This is when studies consistently show more than 50 per cent of meetings are considered unproductive.
That’s not collaboration. That’s calendar warfare. Somewhere along the line, being busy became confused with being productive. Meetings multiplied, calendars filled up and work quietly slipped into the gaps between them.
Research suggests more than one-third of meetings end with no clear actions, many of them generating discussion rather than decisions, while follow-up is often verbal, vague, or forgotten entirely.
Which explains why you leave on the long walk back to your desk thinking: “I’m not sure why I was there … but I was definitely there.”
*James Mason has worked for various organisations over an 18-year career. A seasoned blogger, he has created the blogsite Office Bantomime. This article first appeared on the Office Bantomime website.
