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From Chaos to Control: The Power of Time Management Workshops
Meeting Madness: How Australian Businesses Are Talking Themselves to Death
The video session was supposed to start at 2 PM.
The average professional now spends 42% of their week in meetings.
Walking through any corporate office between 10 AM and 4 PM, you'll see the same thing: empty desks and full meeting rooms.
That's not including the opportunity cost of what doesn't get done while everyone's sitting around a table discussing things that could be resolved in a five-minute conversation. The meeting culture has become so entrenched that people feel guilty when they're not in meetings. I've had executives tell me they don't feel productive unless their calendar is completely booked with back-to-back sessions.
We've created a culture where being busy is more important than being useful.
The uncomfortable truth about meeting culture? most of them are just poor planning disguised as collaboration.
Think about the last "brainstorming session" you attended. How much actual brainstorming happened? How many concrete decisions emerged?
I'll bet the first twenty minutes were spent on things everyone already knew, the middle section was dominated by whoever loves to hear themselves talk, and the final portion was a rushed attempt to assign actions that were probably unnecessary in the first place.
This isn't collaboration - it's collective procrastination for leaders who can't communicate clearly outside of a formal setting. It's management theatre, performed for an audience of captive employees.
Let me tell you about the worst meeting I ever experienced.
I watched a marketing department spend nearly two hours in a meeting discussing why their previous meeting had run overtime.
The first meeting ran for nearly three hours. The agenda covered fifteen different projects, most of which only involved two or three people in the room. By the end, everyone knew a little bit about everything, but nobody had the time to actually work on anything.
Within a month, they were having meetings to plan meetings, and follow-up meetings to discuss what was covered in the previous meetings. The project delays got worse, not better. The irony was completely lost on them. They genuinely couldn't see that the meeting about meetings was the exact problem they were trying to solve.
Digital meetings have removed the natural barriers that used to limit how often we got together.
Before Zoom and Teams, the inconvenience of gathering people in one room created natural limits. That friction meant you only called meetings when they were genuinely necessary.
Now you can set up a video call in thirty seconds, invite dozens people with a few clicks, and create the illusion of progress without any of the logistical constraints that used to make people think twice.
The result? Meeting inflation. What used to be a phone call is now a formal meeting with agendas. Every day is fragmented into hour-long chunks between different sessions.
What absolutely drives me mental about meeting culture: the myth that more communication automatically leads to better results.
Excessive communication often creates more problems than it solves.
I worked with a design team that was so committed to "transparent communication" that designers were spending more time explaining their work than actually doing it.
Every concept needed to be presented in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was mediocre work that had been focus-grouped into blandness. The best ideas died in the endless review processes.
Innovation doesn't happen in conference rooms full of diverse perspectives.
The meeting industrial complex has its own vocabulary designed to make everything sound important.
"Let's circle back on this" - translation: "I haven't thought this through, but I don't want to look unprepared."
{{"{Let's get everyone in a room|We need all the stakeholders aligned|This requires a cross-functional approach}" - translation: "I'm afraid to make a decision, so let's spread the responsibility around."|The phrase "let's unpack this" makes me want to {scream|lose my mind|run for the hills}.}}
"We should touch base next week" - translation: "Nothing will actually change, but we'll create the illusion of progress through scheduling." It's become corporate speak for "let's turn a simple issue into an hour-long discussion that resolves nothing."
But here's where I'll probably lose some people: most "collaborative" meetings are actually harmful to real teamwork.
True collaboration happens when team members have the time to develop ideas independently, then come together to build on each other's work.
Collaboration isn't sitting in a room discussing from scratch - it's skilled workers bringing their best thinking to a time-limited discussion. The meetings that actually work are the ones where people come ready, not the ones where they come to figure things out together.
How do you fix a meeting-addicted organisation?
Introduce friction back into the meeting process.
The most productive companies I work with have strict rules: no meeting without a clear purpose, no recurring meetings without regular justification, and no meetings longer than ninety minutes without a documented reason.
Some organisations assign a dollar cost to meetings based on the hourly rates of attendees. When you see that your "quick sync" is costing $1,200 per hour, you start to think differently about whether it's necessary. The output improvements are usually immediate.
Stop confusing data transfer with meaningful interaction.
The majority of meeting time is wasted on information that could be shared more effectively through written updates.
The development teams that do this well have real-time visibility that eliminates the need for progress reviews entirely.
I worked with a consulting firm that replaced their weekly status meetings with a simple weekly report. Meeting time dropped by 60%, and project communication actually improved. Everyone can see what's happening without sitting through meeting discussions.
Third, embrace the fact that not everyone needs to be involved in every decision.
The desire with broad consultation has created meeting inflation where twelve people discuss problems that could be resolved by a small group.
Consultation is important for organisational issues, but not every choice requires group consensus. Most operational decisions should be made by the people closest to the work. They understand that more perspectives isn't always useful perspectives.
The measurement that transformed my thinking about meetings:
Track the ratio of meeting time to implementation time on your important work.
I've worked with organisations where people were working overtime to complete tasks because their normal working hours were consumed by discussions.
Sometimes the ratio is even worse. High-performing companies flip this ratio. They spend limited time in meetings and maximum time on execution. The talking serves the doing, not the other way around.
That's not productivity - it's madness.
The emotional investment in meeting culture is worth examining.
There's also a security in meetings. If you're in meetings all day, you can't be held accountable for not completing work.
Implementation is often individual, risky, and doesn't provide the same visible feedback as leading a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your commitment, even if they don't produce outcomes.
There's definitely a place for collective problem-solving.
The sessions that work are focused, well-prepared, and outcome-driven. They bring together the key stakeholders to create solutions that require real-time interaction.
Everything else is just organisational ritual that wastes the time and energy that could be used on actual work. They're selective about when to use them, disciplined about how to run them, and realistic about whether they're working.
The biggest lesson I've learned about meetings?
Effective meetings create decisions that reduces the need for follow-up discussion.
Ineffective meetings multiply like cancer cells.
Choose accordingly.
The future of Australian success depends on it.
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