You've been in this meeting for forty-five minutes. It was supposed to be a "quick sync." Someone is still talking. You check your calendar and see another meeting starting in fifteen minutes. You wonder how you'll ever get actual work done today.

This isn't just your workplace. Meetings have evolved into something that expands to fill any available time, and often beyond it. What should take ten minutes regularly stretches to an hour. What should be an email becomes a standing weekly commitment.

The frustration is universal. You're not imagining it. Meetings really have gotten longer, more frequent, and less productive. The calendar has become the enemy of the work.

The Problem People Keep Running Into

The core issue is simple: meetings have become the default solution for everything. Need to make a decision? Schedule a meeting. Need to share information? Schedule a meeting. Need to align on something vague? Schedule a meeting. The meeting is the answer to every question.

Calendar software made it trivially easy to grab someone's time. A few clicks and suddenly thirty minutes of their day belongs to you. There's no friction, no cost, and no consideration required. The technology enabled the abuse.

The result is calendars packed with back-to-back commitments, leaving no time for the work that meetings are supposedly about. People attend meetings to discuss work they haven't had time to do because they were in other meetings. The meetings prevent the work they're meant to coordinate.

The content often doesn't justify the time. Status updates that could be written are spoken. Information that could be read is presented. Decisions that one person could make require ten people to witness. The ceremony matters more than the substance.

How Modern Systems Created This

Several forces combined to create meeting culture as we know it:

Digital calendars removed friction. Before shared calendars, scheduling a meeting required actual coordination. You had to ask people when they were free. Now you just find an open slot and book it. The effort shifted from the organizer to the attendee. Convenience for one became burden for many.

Remote work accelerated it. When you can't tap someone on the shoulder, a video call becomes the replacement. What would have been a two-minute conversation becomes a thirty-minute scheduled event with a link and an agenda. The informal got formalized.

Visibility became currency. In many workplaces, being seen matters. Meetings are visible. Solo work isn't. Attending meetings signals engagement, even if nothing gets accomplished. Presence substitutes for productivity.

No one owns the cost. The person scheduling a meeting doesn't pay for it. The cost is distributed across all attendees, invisible in any budget or metric. A one-hour meeting with eight people costs eight hours of productivity, but no one tracks that. The tragedy of the commons plays out on calendars.

Decision-making diffused. Organizations became allergic to individual decisions. Getting buy-in, building consensus, and looping people in all require meetings. The decision takes a meeting; the meeting generates more decisions needing more meetings.

Why It Keeps Getting Worse

Once meeting culture takes hold, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle. More meetings mean less time for individual work. Less individual work means more uncertainty and misalignment. More uncertainty means more meetings to "get aligned." The solution is the cause.

People also learn to protect themselves by scheduling their own meetings. If your calendar looks full, you seem busy and important. Empty calendars invite more meeting requests. So everyone fills their calendars preemptively. Defense becomes offense.

Meeting length has inflated too. Calendar defaults are usually thirty minutes or an hour. Few people schedule fifteen-minute meetings, even when that's all they need. The container expands the content. The time allotted gets filled.

And meetings breed more meetings. Every meeting generates action items, questions, and follow-ups that require... more meetings. The output of a meeting is more meetings.

Recurring meetings are particularly insidious. They happen whether or not there's something to discuss. The standing weekly becomes immutable, even when it's regularly unproductive. No one wants to be the one to cancel it.

How People Cope Today

Without organizational change, individuals develop their own survival strategies. Some block "focus time" on their calendars, treating fake meetings as shields against real ones. Others adopt no-meeting days, though these are hard to enforce when everyone doesn't agree.

Many people simply accept that real work happens outside normal hours. Early mornings, late evenings, and weekends become the time for focused work, while the workday itself is consumed by meetings. The calendar dictates; you adapt.

Some have started pushing back quietly, declining meetings without clear agendas, asking "could this be an email?" more often, and leaving meetings that run over their allotted time. Small rebellions that signal the problem without solving it.

A few organizations have tried structural solutions: meeting-free days, required agendas, time limits that are actually enforced. These help when leadership commits to them. Without that commitment, the meetings always creep back.

The meeting problem isn't really about meetings. It's about how we've let convenience and visibility replace thoughtfulness about how we spend our collective time. Until organizations start treating attention as a finite resource with real costs, the meetings will keep multiplying. The calendar will remain the graveyard of productive work.