Advice

Why Most Meetings Are Absolute Time Vampires (And How to Kill Them Dead)

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If I had a dollar for every pointless meeting I've sat through in my 18 years of corporate consulting, I'd own half of Collins Street by now.

Seriously. The amount of absolute garbage that passes for "collaboration" in Australian workplaces would make you weep. I was in a two-hour "alignment session" just last month where we spent 47 minutes discussing the font choice for a quarterly report that literally three people would read. Three people! Meanwhile, the actual quarterly numbers were falling faster than a tourist's wallet at Crown Casino.

But here's the thing that'll ruffle some feathers: most managers are secretly terrified of not having meetings. They think it makes them look important. Busy. Indispensable.

Wrong.

The Meeting Industrial Complex Has Gone Mad

Let me paint you a picture. Sarah from Melbourne (real person, changed name obviously) runs a mid-sized logistics company. When I first worked with her team, they were having 23 regular weekly meetings. Twenty-three! That's basically a part-time job just sitting in rooms talking about work instead of actually doing work.

Here's what really gets my goat: 67% of these meetings had no clear outcome defined beforehand. None. Just "let's touch base" or "quick sync" or my personal favourite, "strategic discussion." Strategic my left foot.

You know what happened when we cut those meetings by 70%? Revenue went up 23% in six months. Coincidence? I think not.

The Three Meeting Types That Actually Work

Look, I'm not some anti-meeting zealot. Meetings have their place. But only three types deserve to exist:

Decision meetings. Someone needs to make a call and they need input. Forty-five minutes max. Decision gets made. Done.

Information broadcasts. New policy, company update, quarterly results. Thirty minutes. No discussion. Questions via email later.

Problem-solving sessions. Specific problem, specific people with specific expertise. Ninety minutes maximum with a clear deliverable.

Everything else? Bin it.

The controversial bit here is that most "brainstorming" sessions are complete rubbish. Sorry, not sorry. I've seen more innovation happen over coffee in the hallway than in those sterile conference rooms with whiteboards covered in meaningless sticky notes.

The Australian Meeting Malady

We Australians have this weird relationship with meetings. We're too polite to call them out when they're useless, but we'll whinge about them for hours afterwards at the pub. It's cultural self-sabotage.

I remember working with a mining company in Perth where the regional manager was running daily 8am "check-ins" with his team. Daily! For a team that literally saw each other all day anyway. When I suggested cutting them to weekly, you'd think I'd suggested sacrificing his firstborn.

Six months later, he admitted it was the best change he'd made in years. Productivity up, stress down, and his team actually started liking their jobs again.

The Real Cost of Meeting Madness

Here's some maths that'll make your accountant cry. Average manager salary in Australia: $95,000. That's roughly $50 per hour. Got eight people in a two-hour meeting? That's $800 of salary cost, not counting the opportunity cost of what they could've been doing instead.

Multiply that across a year of pointless meetings and you're looking at tens of thousands down the drain. For what? So everyone feels "included"?

The Meeting Aikido Method

This is my signature approach, and yes, I've shamelessly stolen the name from martial arts because it sounds cooler than "Gareth's Common Sense Meeting Framework."

Before the meeting: Send an agenda 24 hours prior. No agenda, no meeting. Simple. Include the decision to be made or problem to be solved. If you can't articulate this in two sentences, you don't need a meeting.

During the meeting: Start and end on time. No exceptions. Park tangents in a "parking lot" document. Make the decision or solve the problem. Assign specific actions to specific people with specific deadlines.

After the meeting: Send action items within two hours. Not a novel, just bullet points. Who's doing what by when.

Revolutionary stuff, right? You'd be amazed how many organisations think this is genius-level strategic thinking.

The Technology Trap

Don't get me started on virtual meetings. Actually, do get me started because this is important.

Zoom fatigue is real, but it's not because of the technology. It's because people are running the same terrible meetings they always did, just through a screen now. The problem isn't the medium, it's the message.

Some of the best meetings I've facilitated in the last two years have been virtual. Why? Because you can't ramble as easily when everyone can see you talking to a camera. People get to the point faster.

But here's where I probably lost half of you: I think most in-person meetings are actually worse than virtual ones. There, I said it. In-person meetings encourage showboating, side conversations, and that weird power dynamic where whoever talks loudest wins.

Virtual meetings democratise participation. Introverts can contribute via chat. You can mute the ramblers. And if someone's phone rings, it doesn't derail the entire discussion.

The Meeting-Free Zones

Here's a radical idea that's worked brilliantly for three of my clients: meeting-free Fridays.

Entire organisation goes quiet on Fridays. No meetings scheduled. People actually get work done. Revolutionary concept, I know.

The pushback is always the same: "But what about urgent decisions?" Here's the kicker - in 18 months of implementing this across different companies, exactly zero urgent decisions couldn't wait until Monday. Zero.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Status Updates

Status update meetings are the workplace equivalent of reality TV - completely pointless but somehow addictive for managers who mistake activity for progress.

If you need a weekly meeting to know what your team is doing, you're either micromanaging or your team isn't documenting their work properly. Both are fixable without sitting in a room for an hour.

Slack, Microsoft Teams, even a simple shared document can handle 90% of status updates. The remaining 10% that need discussion? Handle them in one-on-ones or quick huddles with just the relevant people.

When Meetings Actually Matter

Okay, confession time. I've run some spectacularly bad meetings in my time. Early in my consulting career, I thought more structure meant longer agendas. Wrong. I once created a four-page agenda for a 90-minute session. Four pages!

The meeting ran three hours and achieved nothing except making everyone hate structured meetings forever.

The lesson? Sometimes less structure is more. Sometimes you need to let conversations flow organically. The trick is knowing when to guide and when to get out of the way.

The Meeting Rebellion Starts Now

Look, changing meeting culture is like turning a cargo ship - it takes time and patience. But it starts with individuals taking responsibility.

Next meeting you're in, ask these three questions:

What decision are we making today?
Who needs to be here for that decision?
What happens if we don't make this decision today?

If you can't answer all three clearly, you probably shouldn't be in that room.

The future belongs to organisations that respect people's time. That understand the difference between being busy and being productive. That recognise meetings are a tool, not a way of life.

So here's my challenge: cut your meetings by 30% this month. See what happens. I guarantee you'll get more done, stress less, and maybe even start enjoying work again.

Because life's too short for meaningless meetings, and Australia's too competitive for organisations that waste time talking about work instead of doing it.