If you’ve been part of the workforce for any amount of time you’ll have an opinion on meetings. They can range from a chat between two people through to 100+ people all getting presented at. Meetings can be either in-person or online nowadays, and honestly there’s not much difference between them for the purposes of this post (though I value in-person more).

Despite posting this I’m not against them - they definitely have their place. Where they don’t belong though are the pointless ones. The ones that you sit through pretending you’re listening. The ones that could have been an email. Those are the costly meetings.

They’re costly in both sense of the word, they have both a monetary and morale cost.

If 2 people meet for 1 hour that’s 2 hours of total work time the meeting occupied. If a team of 20 meet for 1 hour, that’s 20 hours - almost 3 full work days! It starts getting really scary when you have that weekly company all-hands with 100+ people in the room.

And that’s the best case scenario. I often find that a 1 hour time slot is almost a 2 hour distraction because of the 30 minutes either side of it.

If you apply the monetary cost to those amount of hours, it really does add up. Now that’s not to say you aren’t deriving any value from those meetings - you might! But are you willing to spend the cash to find out?

Then there’s the morale cost. I do suspect that most people assume meetings are necessary, maybe they even enjoy them. But in a world full of remote work it can be soul destroying to sit in back to back video calls where you don’t feel it’s actually necessary. If you just want to do some good work that’s extremely difficult to do if you keep getting interrupted.

Where they are best though are the social calls, but I wouldn’t even class those as a meeting. These are the ones that would replace going out to grab a coffee with your coworkers, or hanging out for a while after at the bar. The social interaction is more helpful to getting work done than I think we realise.