The meeting that ate the morning

Editor: Updated 28th July 2026.

Effective meetings are rare. They shouldn’t be.

Updated 28th July 2026. Updated 31st July

Picture the scene. I'm in Copenhagen delivering an Everyday Communication Workshop for a client. It's cold outside. It's warm in here. The coffee is good. And I have 30 + people developing stronger, more effective communication skills. Or so hope.

I ask the question I always ask near the front half of the workshop.

"Has anyone here ever sat in a truly effective meeting?"

A few people glance sideways to see who'll be brave enough to go first. One or two hands drift up to half-mast, then, on looking around some more, the owner of the hands quietly reconsiders their choice. Mostly, the hands stay down – a room full of experienced professionals, no doubt thousands of meetings between them, and barely a raised hand to show for it. They were honest at least.

Which is a rather intriguing thing, when you sit with it. Because, we spend a vast part of our working life in meetings, and most of us can't clearly remember a really good one.

Life is fleeting, and yet we fill it with another meeting – and, to boot, a great many of them are often ineffective. That really ought to bother us more than it does. Meetings are expensive, and not chiefly in money. They cost time, energy and attention: the three genuinely finite things any of us has, the ones no budget will ever top up. A meeting is one of the most costly stretches of road between an idea and the value it might one day become – and we pave it, hour after hour, with people watching a screen while someone reads out a status they could have typed in a sentence.

Now – here's the part worth mulling over a little. After two decades inside organisations, I've reached a rather uncomfortable conclusion: most meetings are ineffective by design. Too long. Too crowded. Too vague. Too polite. Bizarrely allergic to actually deciding anything. And once you see that it's a design problem rather than a people problem, something rather optimistic and hopeful follows – because a better meeting doesn't need a slicker facilitator, more voices, or full command of our non-verbal communication, nor a better template. It needs a few simple choices, typically made before anyone sits down.

None of which is to say meetings aren't needed. They are – but only when a decision can no longer be made by one person, or when expertise has to be gathered from several people at once. The trouble is that we reach for them the way some of us reach for biscuits to have with our Earl Grey: out of habit, for comfort, and long after the actual need has passed.

We use them for status updates an email would serve better, and for decisions everyone in the room is genuinely hoping somebody else will make.

So it's worth getting good at them. Not slick. Not efficient. Just effective.

I tend to suggest starting with what a meeting actually is, because the word has been stretched to cover almost anything with a calendar invite attached.

As I see it, a meeting is simply this: a gathering of people to make a decision no single person can make alone. That definition, gently applied, clears out a surprising amount of clutter.

A brainstorm isn't a meeting – it's a workshop where creativity, silly ideas, quiet voices and a lot of good discussion should happen. A strategy off-site is a workshop wearing a posh jacket. A one-to-one is a conversation. An interview, oddly, is a meeting: a decision comes out the other end that no single person could make on their own. And if there's no decision to be made at all, it's worth asking, kindly but firmly, whether the thing needs to exist in the first place. After all, what problem are you trying to solve?

Meetings earn their place for three clear reasons: the information is spread across several people, the expertise is shared, or the authority is collective. When none of those is true, the meeting is usually standing in for something else – a little missing confidence, perhaps, or a status update that's put on a smart frock for the occasion.

Meetings come apart, though, for reasons you could set your watch by and place a bet on. The wrong people are invited. The purpose is fuzzy. Nobody's quite sure who actually decides. The decision maker isn't even there. The meeting runs to the clock rather than to the outcome – an hour was booked, so an hour shall be filled.

Politeness and fear elbows honesty out of the way. Consensus gets mistaken for judgement and agreement. Large groups are especially prone to all of this: wonderful at generating ideas, quietly hopeless at choosing between them, particularly when no one's certain whose call it is.

So before you send the invite, consider one plain, obvious and simple question – could I just make this decision on my own? If the answer's yes, do that, and hand everyone their morning back. If it's no, the meeting has earned its place, and now it's worth running properly.

A few principles hold up remarkably well here, drawn from the Effective Workplace Communication workbook, and they're less a formula than a set of good habits.

The first is to decide before you invite. Know the decision to be made, or the problem to be solved, before the invite goes out. If you can't name it clearly, no one else will manage to either, and you'll spend the opening twenty minutes watching a room try to reverse-engineer why it's there.

Invite only the people who hold the information, bring a needed perspective, or have the right to decide. Every extra body adds cost and complexity rather than value – a meeting being one of the few places on earth where more people reliably means less done. I know people want to feel like they're involved in everything, but when everyone's involved in everything, don't be surprised when very little work gets done.

The second: shorter beats longer. An hour isn't a law of nature or a rule from the government; it's a habit, and a lazy one. Book twenty-five minutes, or forty. Finish early and hand the time back like a small gift wrapped in nice paper with a bow on it. Declare victory and leave. Parkinson's Law – work expands to fill the time available – applies to meetings with particular gusto; give a decision a whole hour and it will graciously accept the whole hour. Probably more.

The third is the agenda, which isn't a formality so much as a signal, and an important one. A good one settles three things before anyone arrives: why we're here, what we're deciding, and what you're expected to have done beforehand. To arrive without one is simply to decide, in advance, to let vagueness, opinion and small talk walk in ahead of you and take the best seats by the window. The one where you can see the nice bar across the road.

The fourth is a few clear norms – not rules for the sake of control, but small agreements that protect everyone's time, energy and attention. Start on time. Say what you actually think. No silent nodding in the room followed by frank dissent in the corridor with your team. Disagree in the meeting; commit once you leave it. This asks for a climate of safety – strong teams can argue hard precisely because the trust beneath them is strong – and until that trust is built, a few shared expectations will do the work in its place.

The fifth: presence beats performance. The most influential person in a meeting is almost never the loudest. They sit comfortably, listen properly, speak clearly, ask the good question everyone else was wishing they'd asked, and say rather less while meaning quite a lot more. Presence isn't dominance. It's steadiness – calm, attentive, unhurried, thoughtful, well considered – the person who somehow makes the room feel a little more sane simply by being in it.

And the sixth: capture what matters. Someone owns the notes. Actions get names attached to them. Decisions are written down. Follow-up is visible to all and aligned upon. If nothing survives the meeting, the meeting didn't really happen – it was just a warm room, coffee and a borrowed hour, gone for good.

One last thing, more equine than the rest, about how you show up. If you've something meaningful to add, don't hoard it for the final minute. I once worked with a man who saved his single sharpest observation for the closing seconds of every meeting, delivered with a small flourish and a glint in his eye, purely for the effect it had. It always landed beautifully – and it almost always cost us a further meeting to deal with whatever he'd just air dropped into the room. So speak when it matters, back up what you say, and then – the underrated part – stop talking. Listening isn't the passive half of a conversation. It's the other half of influence.

And if all of this is starting to sound a touch idealised – the calm room, the named actions, the twenty-five minutes – let me show you the other version. The one you almost certainly recognise.

A meeting, in real time.

10:00am — You arrive for the 10 o'clock, keen to get things done, only to find the previous meeting still in full flow.

10:02am — After standing outside the room making a few over-enthusiastic watch-checking gestures through the glass, you give up and go make a coffee.

10:05am — You return, coffee in hand. The room is still busy with the previous meeting. None of your own attendees have turned up yet.

10:06am — The project manager from the overrunning meeting holds up a single index finger to signal he'll be no more than a minute. You resist the powerful urge to hold up a different finger in reply.

10:10am — The previous meeting finally breaks up. Its attendees file out, scowling at you for making them stop before they'd decided anything.

10:15am — Still no one has arrived for your meeting. On the plus side, you've bagged the best seat at the back, the one by the window with the good people-watching vantage.

10:17am — With nobody yet here, you decide to make a second coffee.

10:18am — While making it, you're overcome by a sudden streak of mischief. You unscrew the lid of the sugar shaker so it still looks sealed but isn't. Hilarious. The next person's coffee is going to be a masterpiece.

10:20am — You return to find every attendee already seated and waiting. You are now, somehow, the last to arrive. Gobsmacked, you make your apologies. The only chair left is the one at the very front by the radiator.

10:21am — The Product Owner decides to take a phone call and leaves the room.

10:23am — The Product Owner returns, at which point the decision-making exec decides she now needs to leave.

10:24am — The meeting finally begins. First agenda item: how to eliminate waste and unproductive activity in the project.

10:24:20am — You bite your lip and keep your thoughts about late meetings entirely to yourself. Everyone now believes you were the late one.

10:26am — You begin, gently, to throw rolled-up balls of paper at the tech lead.

10:27am — Apparently the defect count is down. Smiles. A muted "hurrah."

10:28am — The defect count is down because nobody has done any work: the IT systems have crashed the servers. A general feeling of disappointment floods the room.

10:36am — After more statistics, cost models and other illusions of productivity, the need for the toilet becomes pressing.

10:45am — The PO, having been reading email on his phone throughout, announces that the CEO has just had a sugar shaker's worth of sugar emptied into his coffee, and demands that the child responsible step forward.

10:45:10am — Your face turns grey. You feel faint.

10:45:20am — You begin to hum with nervous energy.

10:45:30am — You are asked to stop humming. And to sit still. And to stop throwing bits of paper at people. And whether you're quite all right, because your face has gone a remarkable shade of grey.

10:48am — The discussion moves to team morale.

10:49am — A blame session erupts, with some heated exchanges. And although it is emphatically "not a blame culture," it is, on balance, definitely the product lead's fault.

10:52am — Someone suggests a coffee break. Someone else suggests abandoning the meeting altogether. The Product Owner suggests we press on.

11:09am — The meeting ends, chased out by the attendees for the next one. The group disperses. You bolt for the toilet. The only decision reached was that the team will need another meeting.

11:15am — You arrive late to that next meeting — an ironically scheduled session, run by HR, on time management.