Rethinking the meetings in your calendar
How meetings become habits (and what to do about it)
How many times this week have you sat in a meeting and thought, “This could have been an email"? Or left a meeting with no clear idea of why you were there, what happened and what the next steps should be?
Meetings take up plenty of space in calendars, but they don’t always add value, and often, they take time out from the work you actually need to be getting done.
Most meetings start with a purpose — a weekly check-in to stay aligned, a project sync to keep things moving, or a catch-up to solve a specific issue. The problem is that recurring meetings often lose that purpose, but no one stops to question them.
It’s easy to treat meetings as time blocks. An hour here, thirty minutes there. They don’t necessarily take up much time individually, but put together, they can have a cumulative effect.
It’s hard to get into meaningful work when the day is constantly interrupted. Meetings also create decision fatigue and slow progress because there’s more talk than action.
How meetings turn into habits
Inertia - Once a meeting is in the calendar, it stays. There’s no trigger to review it, so it carries on.
Risk avoidance - Cancelling feels like creating a gap, which might be questioned. Or people might feel that a decision will be missed if the meeting isn’t there.
Signalling work - Meetings are visible. Being in them can feel like being productive, even when nothing moves forward.
Lack of better systems - Meetings are often used to communicate status updates, make quick decisions, or check in, which could be done by email or other methods if someone just worked out a process.
Making meetings more intentional
The goal isn’t to remove meetings entirely.
Instead of asking, “Do we have too many meetings?”, ask, “Why does this meeting exist?”
Question recurring meetings - If it didn’t already exist, would you create it today? Consider the purpose of the meeting. If it’s unclear, the meeting probably isn’t needed.
Replace where possible - Think about other methods of communicating, especially for quick decisions or status updates. Options include email, chat systems, a shared progress document, or a task management system.
Adjust the format - Not every meeting needs an hour. Not every weekly meeting needs to stay weekly. Ask attendees how they think things could be improved. Having an agenda, sticking to it and limiting time spent on each point can also help meetings flow and avoid wasting time.
Normalise cancelling - “There’s nothing to cover this week, so let’s skip it” should be a normal outcome.
With a few conscious changes, meetings can turn from things that simply block up your calendar to purposeful gatherings where real work gets done.
If every recurring meeting in your calendar disappeared tomorrow, how many would you bring back?