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The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible

I walked into another boardroom last Thursday, looked around at the usual suspects slouched in their chairs scrolling through phones, and thought: "Here we bloody go again." Twenty-three minutes of my life I'll never get back, watching Margaret from accounting read PowerPoint slides word-for-word while Dave from IT interrupts every thirty seconds with irrelevant technical details that nobody asked for.

Sound familiar? Of course it does.

After seventeen years of sitting through, facilitating, and occasionally rescuing thousands of meetings across Melbourne, Sydney, and everywhere in between, I've cracked the code on why 87% of workplace meetings are an absolute waste of everyone's time. And no, it's not what you think.

It's Not About the Agenda (Though Yours Probably Sucks)

Everyone bangs on about having clear agendas. "Send the agenda 24 hours in advance!" they cry. "Stick to your talking points!" Sure, that helps. But I've seen plenty of meetings with picture-perfect agendas that still turned into marathon sessions of corporate word salad.

The real problem? Nobody actually knows what a meeting is supposed to accomplish.

I learned this the hard way back in 2009 when I was brought in to fix a manufacturing company's weekly leadership meetings. These sessions ran for three hours every Tuesday. THREE HOURS. The CEO was convinced they needed more structure, better facilitation, maybe some advanced presentation skills training for his team leaders.

Wrong on all counts.

The issue wasn't how they ran meetings. It was why they were meeting in the first place.

The Five Types of Meetings (And Why You're Probably Mixing Them Up)

After analysing hundreds of dysfunctional meetings, I've identified exactly five legitimate reasons to gather people in a room:

Information Sharing - Someone has updates everyone needs to hear. Should take 15 minutes max. No discussion required.

Decision Making - A specific choice needs to be made, and you need the right brains to make it. Usually involves 3-5 people who actually have skin in the game.

Problem Solving - Something's broken and needs fixing. Requires people with relevant expertise and authority to implement solutions.

Brainstorming - Generating new ideas or approaches. Works best with diverse perspectives and zero judgment.

Team Building - Building relationships and trust. Often happens over coffee or drinks, not in conference rooms.

Most terrible meetings happen because someone's trying to do all five things at once. It's like trying to use a hammer to fix your car's transmission. Wrong tool, mate.

The Australian Meeting Culture Problem

Here's something nobody talks about: we Australians are particularly bad at meetings because we're too polite to call out obvious time-wasting. We sit there nodding while Sandra from HR explains the new parking policy for the fifteenth time this quarter, because pointing out the obvious waste would be "rude."

This cultural quirk creates meeting monsters.

I once worked with a Brisbane-based consultancy where the weekly team meeting regularly hit the two-hour mark. Nobody complained. Nobody pushed back. They just accepted it as "how things work around here." When I finally suggested they try 30-minute stand-up meetings instead, the productivity gains were immediate. Like, within a week they'd freed up six hours of collective time.

But here's the kicker - half the team initially resisted the change because shorter meetings felt "too American" or "too aggressive."

Absolute nonsense.

The Meeting Invitation Test

Want to know if your meeting will be terrible before it starts? Look at who's invited.

If you've got more than seven people, you're already in trouble. If you've included people "just to keep them in the loop," you've failed. If anyone on that list doesn't have a specific role or contribution, you're wasting their time and yours.

I once consulted for a Perth mining company where the weekly safety meeting included twenty-three people. Twenty-three! The actual safety discussion involved maybe four people. The rest sat there because "they might have something valuable to add."

Spoiler alert: they didn't.

The fix was brutal but effective. We cut the invitation list to six people who actually made safety decisions. Everyone else got a five-minute email summary afterwards. Meeting time dropped from 90 minutes to 25 minutes. Safety incidents didn't increase. In fact, they went down because the decision-makers could focus properly.

Technology Isn't Fixing This

Don't get me started on the tech solutions. Every month there's some new meeting app or collaboration platform that promises to revolutionise how we work together. Zoom fatigue. Microsoft Teams overwhelm. Slack notification hell.

The problem isn't the platform. It's that we're digitising bad meeting habits instead of fixing them.

I've watched teams spend forty minutes in a video call trying to collectively edit a document that one person could have fixed in ten minutes. I've seen brainstorming sessions die because everyone's staring at their screens instead of looking at each other. I've witnessed heated arguments over camera positioning that lasted longer than the actual business discussion.

Here's a radical thought: maybe some conversations work better face-to-face. Maybe some decisions require old-fashioned phone calls. Maybe that "urgent" meeting could be a two-sentence email.

The Power Move Nobody Talks About

Ready for the meeting hack that'll change your professional life? Start declining invitations.

Not all of them. Just the ones where your presence doesn't matter.

This takes guts. Especially in corporate environments where showing up to everything feels like a loyalty test. But I promise you, nobody will die if you skip the quarterly all-hands meeting where they read financial results you could scan in three minutes.

I started doing this in my own consultancy around 2015. Instead of automatically accepting every meeting request, I'd reply with a simple question: "What specific input do you need from me?"

About 60% of the time, people realised they didn't actually need me there. They just wanted me informed, which an email could handle perfectly.

The remaining 40% led to much more focused, productive conversations because the meeting organiser had to think clearly about objectives before we started.

The Meeting Audit Challenge

Here's what I dare you to do next week: track every meeting you attend. Note the stated purpose, actual duration, number of attendees, and what specific outcome was achieved.

Then ask yourself: which of these meetings actually moved something forward?

When I did this exercise with a Sydney-based marketing agency, the results were shocking. Out of 23 meetings in one week, only 6 had clear outcomes. The rest were variations of "let's touch base" or "keeping everyone aligned."

That's not progress. That's performance art.

Why Some Companies Get This Right

Not everyone's hopeless at meetings. Some organisations have cracked the code, and it's usually because they treat meeting time like money. Because that's exactly what it is.

I've worked with engineering firms that charge internal meeting time to project budgets. Suddenly, those weekly check-ins become much more efficient when someone's watching the dollars tick away.

Atlassian famously banned meetings on Wednesdays company-wide. Initially people panicked about losing coordination. Then they discovered they got more actual work done on Wednesdays than any other day of the week.

Google's approach fascinates me too. They encourage "walking meetings" for discussions that don't require screens or notes. Turns out, people make decisions faster when they're moving.

The Meeting Recovery Plan

So how do you fix this mess? Start small. Pick one regular meeting you're responsible for and apply these rules:

Cut the time in half. If it normally runs an hour, schedule 30 minutes. If it's 30 minutes, try 15.

Halve the attendee list. Only include people who need to contribute or decide something.

Start with the end. Begin every meeting by stating exactly what success looks like.

Ban status updates. If someone just needs to share information, make them send an email instead.

End early when you're done. Don't fill time just because it's scheduled.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what really makes meetings terrible: most of them shouldn't exist.

We've created a business culture where calling a meeting feels productive, even when it accomplishes nothing. Where being busy looks more important than being effective. Where face-time matters more than outcomes.

The best meeting I attended this year lasted twelve minutes. We made three important decisions, assigned clear next steps, and everyone left knowing exactly what they needed to do.

The worst one lasted two and a half hours and ended with "let's schedule a follow-up to discuss next steps."

Guess which one actually moved the business forward?

Taking Back Your Calendar

I'm not suggesting we eliminate all meetings. Good ones are essential for collaboration, creativity, and building the relationships that make work worthwhile. But we need to get ruthless about protecting our time from the meeting monsters that drain energy and kill productivity.

Start saying no. Start asking why. Start demanding better.

Your future self will thank you when you've got actual time to do the work you're paid for.

And trust me, your colleagues will notice the difference between someone who calls meetings that matter and someone who just calls meetings.

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