Most meetings shouldn’t exist. Here’s how to fix that.

A mentee of mine — a senior executive — left a 90-minute team meeting about results. I asked him what decisions were made.

He paused. That pause told me more than the meeting did.

If you can’t name the decision after a meeting, you didn’t have a meeting. You had a gathering. And gatherings, however well-intentioned, are one of the most effective ways to fill a week without moving anything forward.

A good friend of mine who leads a large organization put it plainly last week: “This week was full of various internal meetings — so when have I had time to work? I need to stop it somehow.”

In the corporate world, many people experience internal meetings as time-wasters. The bigger the organization, the bigger the challenge. And yet the meetings keep appearing in calendars, week after week, as if by force of organizational gravity.

Sometimes it even seems that all you do during the week is “attending meetings”, doesn’t it?

Why meetings waste time

The most common reasons I’ve observed across organizations and leadership teams:

• Meetings are scheduled based on other people’s priorities, not yours
• There is no clear agenda and no clear desired outcome
• People arrive unprepared
• Too many people are in the room — most of whom cannot impact the result

If a meeting will not move you closer to an important goal, decline it or replace it with a faster communication method.

Evaluate your calendar regularly against this standard. Most leaders who do this for the first time are surprised by how much of their week fails the test.

Before you schedule or accept a meeting — ask these questions

Here are some good questions to ask yourself before you schedule or agree to a meeting:

• Do I actually need to meet? Can I move the issue/project forward by other communication means (call, email, etc)?
• What is the desired outcome I want to achieve as the result of the meeting? How will the meeting help to stimulate progress on the issue/project?
• Can I delegate attendance to someone else?

Answer these honestly, with your most important priorities as the filter. Meetings that can’t answer the second question clearly shouldn’t happen. The side effect of applying this consistently: you get your time back — without losing results.

Don’t commit immediately when a meeting request arrives. Just because someone scheduled it doesn’t mean it’s important for you or that you need to engage. Take time to evaluate how it fits your priorities, then reply. Otherwise you constantly face the reality that other people are planning your weeks while you’re attending theirs.

Meetings for relationship-building, conflict resolution, or genuine strategic alignment are worth protecting. These are harder to replace with an email. Everything else deserves scrutiny.

If you are initiating the meeting:

• Take control of your schedule — initiate on your terms
• Communicate the desired outcome and expectations beforehand
• Invite only those who can impact the results
• Prepare for the meeting
• Limit it to no more than 30 minutes
• Leave with a clear plan for next steps

If you are invited to the meeting:

• Take control of your weekly schedule — evaluate before accepting
• Clarify the expected outcome and your role beforehand
• Attend only if you can meaningfully impact the results
• Prepare for the meeting
• Leave after 30 minutes if the outcome has been reached or the meeting has lost direction
• Leave with a clear plan for next steps

The leadership signal

How you run your meetings tells your team what you believe a meeting is for. If you model meetings without clear outcomes, your team learns that meetings are where you report — not where you decide. That standard spreads quickly and is slow to reverse.

The meeting that ends with a clear decision and named next steps is not just more efficient. It’s a different signal entirely about what leadership looks like in your organization.

What would change in your organization if every meeting had to answer one question before it was scheduled: what decision will we make?

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