My eyes were glazing over by the 31st minute. The screen shimmered with the familiar grid of faces, each one a pixelated testament to time bleeding away. We were, ostensibly, reviewing a slide deck. Not the final deck for the actual client presentation, mind you, but *the* slide deck for the internal review meeting *next week*, where we’d collectively decide if the slides were good enough to show the client. The irony, a bitter, metallic taste, was that the actual work-the core analysis, the creative ideation, the strategic planning-was being squeezed into the margins of an already overstuffed day, often after 5:01 PM.

Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

This isn’t just a scheduling inefficiency; it’s a systemic affliction, a corporate ritual that has metastasized beyond all reasonable bounds. I confess, there was a time, perhaps 11 years ago, when I believed that more meetings meant more collaboration, more alignment. I was so profoundly, spectacularly wrong. I was stuck, much like that stubborn pickle jar last week, refusing to budge despite every ounce of effort. It felt impossible, the lid just wouldn’t give, and in hindsight, my attempts to force it open only made the situation stickier, messier. It was a simple, everyday failure, but it etched a tiny, persistent frustration into my day, a mirror to the larger, more complex frustrations of the workplace.

Think about it for a moment: meetings are arguably the single most expensive activity any company undertakes. You’re paying a room full of people, often highly compensated individuals, to *not* do their primary work. If you tally the combined salaries of everyone in that pre-meeting for the pre-meeting, the cost can easily climb into the hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per hour. For a discussion about a slide’s font choice, or the precise placement of a single bullet point. It’s not just a waste; it’s a direct drain on resources that could be fueling innovation, client solutions, or genuine strategic growth.

This phenomenon isn’t new, of course. My friend Phoenix W., a water sommelier, once observed something profoundly insightful about the purity of purpose. Phoenix, who dedicates their life to discerning the subtle nuances of water – its minerality, its mouthfeel, its ‘terroir’ – explained that true appreciation comes from understanding the *source* and the *intent*. They even host what they call ‘Hydration Sittings’ rather than meetings, focusing on singular, clear goals. “If a water loses its intention, its unique character,” Phoenix mused, gesturing with an elegant glass of sparkling spring water from a volcanic region, “it’s just…wet. Meaningless. Like so many of your corporate gatherings.” It was a surprisingly resonant thought from someone whose daily grind involves sniffing effervescence and swirling dissolved solids. Phoenix believes every decision should be as clear and as crisp as a perfectly aerated glass of water, unclouded by extraneous sediment. My own experience, trying to untangle meeting spaghetti, often felt like trying to clarify mud.

What does this symptom point to? Low trust, for one. If leadership or individual contributors felt truly empowered, if there was genuine trust in their ability to make independent decisions, the need for these layers of review and consensus-building would drastically diminish. Unclear roles and responsibilities are another culprit. When it’s ambiguous who owns what, everyone feels compelled to weigh in, ensuring their voice is heard in the cacophony, lest they be perceived as disengaged. And underlying it all, a deep-seated fear of individual decision-making. It’s safer, less exposed, to defer to the collective, even if that collective is simply rubber-stamping an already agreed-upon path in a room of 11 people who all look slightly bored.

I’ve tried the traditional approaches. Once, full of misplaced enthusiasm, I crafted an elaborate meeting agenda template, complete with time allocations for each point and a mandatory ‘decision-made’ column. My mistake, my truly glaring mistake, was believing that structure alone could fix a cultural problem. The result? People would simply take 41 minutes to discuss a 1-minute agenda item, then rush through the critical points, only to conclude, “We need a follow-up meeting to discuss this properly.” It didn’t fix the issue; it merely provided a more organized framework for its perpetuation. It felt like I’d opened a slightly different pickle jar, only to find the same, stubborn lid, just a new brand. This specific failure, this well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective intervention, was a stark lesson in diagnosing the root cause rather than treating the symptoms. It’s not about the agenda; it’s about the underlying purpose, or lack thereof. This constant cycle of preparing to prepare, for what ultimately felt like a performance, not a decision, reminded me of discussions I’d seen regarding optimizing community engagement, much like what optimizing community engagement explores with its own online communities.

The Path Forward

So, what’s the answer? It’s not a simple one, and it won’t be achieved by adding another mandatory ‘meeting etiquette’ slide to an onboarding deck. It requires a fundamental shift in mindset. It starts with every individual, every team, every department asking: What is the *one* thing we need to achieve in this interaction? If the answer isn’t a clear, actionable decision, a concrete problem solved, or a specific block removed, then perhaps the ‘meeting’ needs to be an email, a chat, or a 1-on-1 discussion.

It means empowering individuals, trusting their judgment, and holding them accountable for their decisions, rather than diffusing responsibility across a virtual room of 11 or 21 passive observers.

It’s about understanding that time is the one non-renewable resource we have. Every moment spent in an unnecessary meeting is a moment stolen from genuine creation, from solving real-world problems, from moving the needle forward. Imagine if all those collective hours, weeks, months, were redirected. What innovations might we unleash? What productivity gains might we see? What genuine impact could we make, not just on a spreadsheet, but on the daily lives of 101, or 1001, people who rely on us? It’s a provocative question, a challenge that stares us down from every calendar invite. What if we just… did the work? What if we just… trusted?

The solution, I believe, lies not in more complex systems or stricter rules, but in a radical simplification, a return to the fundamentals of why we gather at all. It means consciously choosing to prioritize action over performance, trust over control, and impact over attendance. It means challenging every single invite, every single pre-meeting, with the fierce clarity of Phoenix W. assessing a pristine glass of water. Is its purpose pure? Or is it just another drop in an ocean of wasted time? The struggle to find that clarity, to unscrew that stubbornly tight lid, is real, and it persists, often silently, in the heart of our most productive days.