The cursor trembles over ‘Accept.’ You know the feeling. It’s the small, cold wave of dread that washes over you when you look at the calendar entry: Title, ‘Project Sync.’ Attendees, twelve names spread across four departments, none of whom seem to have a defined role in the upcoming hour. And the agenda? It simply reads, ‘Discussion of project status.’
We click ‘Accept’ because the alternative-sending a polite but firm ‘No, what is the goal?’-feels like political suicide. We go because we think bad meetings are a problem of time management, an efficiency flaw that could be fixed with a 30-minute block and a tighter moderator. But this is where we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the crisis. I’ve wasted thousands of hours, probably $4,241 in total salary cost for one particularly aimless afternoon, clinging to that flawed idea. I spent years optimizing the *duration* when I should have been auditing the *intention*.
It’s not a time problem.
It’s a clarity problem.
The goal-less meeting is the symptom of a failure of leadership, an organizational procrastination disguised as collaboration. It’s the leader who has not done the hard work-the lonely, messy, pre-meeting work-of defining the problem, mapping the decision architecture, and committing to a desired, measurable outcome. The moment you schedule a meeting without a clear goal, you are signaling to everyone present that you are more comfortable performing activity than risking a decision.
I used to run weekly
