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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

And meetings breed more meetings. Every meeting generates action items, questions, and follow-ups that require... more meetings.

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.

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.

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.