Time and attention have become the most depleted resource in the modern workplace. Back-to-back meetings, calendar congestion, and constant context-switching crushing our ability to carry the daily cognitive load have created a time deficit that undermines performance, energy, and decision quality.
Managers can spend up to 23 hours a week in meetings. Yet a recent study found 70% of meetings keep employees from valuable work, and that 71% of managers reported meetings to be “costly and unproductive.” Other sources report meeting overload costs an estimated $37 billion in productivity losses per year. Similar research echoes this, pointing to the psychological and cognitive toll of unproductive meetings: lost focus, delayed decisions, shallow work, and chronic burnout.
The problem isn’t just the number of meetings—it’s the lack of discipline around what meetings are for.
When team meetings try to do everything—brainstorming, decision-making, status updates, conflict resolution, and social connection—they end up doing nothing particularly well. Worse, they sap time from crucial areas such as deep thinking, team coaching, problem-solving, decision making, and actual execution.
The fix isn’t expanding or tightening agendas. It’s about making bold fixes: cutting what doesn’t belong, investing time where it matters, and establishing group or team norms that prioritize value over volume.
To help combat time wasting tendencies from your team meetings, I have found simple fixes to common meeting problems that can give your team some much needed time back each week.
1. Stick to focused agendas
Overstuffed agendas cause meetings to run long, drift off course, overflow, kicking topics down the road then requiring follow-ups to resolve what wasn’t finished. Research from Harvard reports that poorly planned and executed agendas are of the top drivers of time wasters. When it comes to agenda prioritization, trade-offs can be made.
The Fix
Define what is truly meeting worthy, then narrow the scope for the agenda. Name a meeting executor, and have them be a stickler for managing topics, time and outcomes. Examples include:
Meeting worthy
- Issues that need collaborative input or high-stakes alignment
- Topics with clear urgency and strategic impact
- Decisions with broader impact needing stakeholder perspectives
Meeting unworthy
- Status updates (move to asynchronous tools like Loom videos or email)
- Topics without a decision requirement or clear purpose
Client Case Tip
A global technology firm I partner with cut their 90-minute executive meeting down to 50 minutes by using a topic submission rubric. If a topic wasn’t timely, decision-ready, or aligned to the top three priorities, it was deferred or redirected to another time or appropriate forum.
2. Be selective about participants
Including everyone to be fair or be seen as inclusive creates bloated attendee lists and meetings where most participants aren’t essential. Some cultures signal that “if you receive a meeting invitation, accept it” as normative behavior no matter if you think you should attend. MIT researchers suggest that even simple acts of becoming more deliberate about accepting meeting invitations will make a positive impact.
The Fix
Invite only those with a clear purpose—and say a kind refusal to “contextual participants,” who can get briefed on the meeting through other means.
Include
- People with decision rights, implementation roles, or critical knowledge to share or weigh in
- Defined roles (e.g., decider, advisor, executor)
- Someone or AI tracking the decisions, actions, and essential communication follow-through items with ownership to share with those who need informational outputs
Exclude
- Stakeholders without a direct role in the outcome
- Passive or contextual participants coming only to follow what’s happening on a project or issue
Client Case Tip
One global leadership team assigned a project lead to review the AI summary and output from every meeting, along with the recording in order to clarify the stakeholders who would need to be kept in the loop. Leaders cut attendance by 35% and saw meeting quality and preparation engagement rise significantly.
3. Create Meeting Norms
Meetings that feel productive in the moment often generate confusion afterward when the expectations of how the meeting should unfold are unmet. My observation is that team members have unspoken and mixed expectations about meeting etiquette, norms, and outcomes. As such, unmet expectations can easily result in everything from disgruntled emotions to repeated discussions that waste time and create churn. Stephen Rogelberg, a professor at University of North Carolina and author of The Surprising Science of Meetings, recommends norms such as taking breaks, limiting individual speaking time so everyone gets a chance to weigh in, and disciplined accountability discussions at the close of meetings to reduce confusion, delays, and rework.
The Fix
Build in useful closure norms, such as 5 to 10 minute closure with mandatory ownership and accountability discussions closing every meeting as to be clear on expectations.
Include
- Budget for a minimum five-minute end-of-meeting recap of what was resolved—and what wasn’t. Leave no loose end unattended to by speaking about where and when what didn’t get resolved would be reviewed
- Capture clear decisions, action items with ownership, timing for completion, and next steps. Many AI tools can summarize and clarify meeting highlights, decisions, actions steps, and other specifics that simply need reviewing for accuracy and distributing to team members
Exclude
- “Ok, it looks like we are out of time,” from poor agenda and time management
- Unhelpful or dated norms that serve as tradition but have no real purpose
- Open-ended conversations with no resolution, especially when the purpose is to manage through a conflict or conflicting ideas
- Deferred decisions without a timeline
Client Case Tips
I worked recently with a team that was notorious for raising issues and bringing ideas to the table—a seemingly great thing—until they ran out of time every meeting. I noticed many off-topic issues were surfaced and time was squandered away from the meeting’s purpose. Eventually, they would place those topics in the “parking lot” of topics, never to be revisited. This was a legacy norm from the previous leader, providing no value, yet consuming precious time. I asked them to assess the relevance of these issues and either commit to discussing them if pertinent or take responsibility for moving the topics to a relevant meeting.
Once they realized no one followed up on the items, the choice became easy and the parking lot practice was dropped.
Another team of executives I worked with would talk over one another until the loudest person in the room dominated the conversation. This left out valuable feedback and points of view prior to important decisions being made. A norm the team agreed upon was to sound a specific ringtone chime when the dynamic occurred. The team would then break for 5 to 10 minutes and return to decide next steps so other voices could be heard in the room.
Finally, one team I worked with saved roughly 32 hours per quarter by simply standardizing next-step assignments at the end of each meeting.
4. Get rid of legacy recurring meetings
Recurring meetings often persist out of habit—even when their original purpose has faded. This cuts into time for strategic work and deep thinking.
The Fix
Once a meeting has a purpose, spend time ruthlessly on that purpose. When that purpose has been met, carefully consider the need to keep meeting or pivot toward addressing a different purpose.
On Purpose
- Meetings with required prework and defined outcomes
- Pre-aligned prep expectations (e.g., review docs, submit questions)
- Assessing how close the team is to addressing the purpose fully
- When/if purpose has been fulfilled, determine next steps immediately
Non on Purpose
- Standing meetings without an active agenda
- Meetings held “just because it’s Monday”
- Legacy meetings that have been repetitively happening out of habit, but no one knows why
Case Study
A consulting firm eliminated a recurring hour-long weekly meeting and replaced it with a “decision-ready” model. Team members were expected to complete prework and submit questions five days in advance. If prep engagement was low, the meeting was canceled, and decision rights were delegated to the project lead. This reclaimed over 100 hours per year—time reallocated to design work, coaching, and client strategy.
Time as a Strategic Asset
Meetings are not just a coordination tool—they are a budgeting choice. Every meeting is a trade-off with real work, deep thinking, and energy management.
When leaders begin treating time like capital—with scrutiny, intention, and discipline—teams get better outcomes with fewer meetings. They make decisions faster, feel less drained, and spend more time on what actually moves the needle. Even at a minimum, teams can reclaim time starting with one question: What are we willing to stop doing so we can spend time where it counts?