Why Cutting Your Availability May Be the Most Productive Thing You Do This Year
If you look at a typical executive’s calendar, CEO, senior leader, or even a well-intentioned middle manager, it tells a familiar story. Meetings stack back to back from early morning until dinner. Eight hours in conference rooms. A rushed sandwich. A sprint to the restroom. And the quiet satisfaction of having been busy all day.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of that wasn’t work. Meetings often masquerade as productivity. They feel official, collaborative, and like progress. Yet in most organizations, they’ve become a substitute for real work rather than a catalyst for it.
The 80% Problem
In my experience, roughly 80 percent of meetings don’t need to happen at all. Many exist for one simple reason: they feel like work. Bringing people together signals activity, even when no real decisions are made, and no work gets done.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “This meeting could have been an email.” People usually say it as a joke. It shouldn’t be, and it is true more often than we’d like to admit.
If a meeting’s sole purpose is to transmit information, and no decision is required, it should not be a meeting. Full stop. Send the information. Let people read it on their own time. Offer a short, optional Q&A, even asynchronously, if needed.
This one change alone can eliminate a significant share of meetings—and, more importantly, return thinking time to your organization.
Beware the “Credit-Seeking” Meeting
There’s another, more subtle force behind calendar bloat: the need to be seen working. B-players often use meetings to claim credit. “I want to show you what I’m doing.” Meetings become performative rather than productive. The work isn’t advanced; it is displayed.
C-players take this even further. They love meetings because they are a great place to hide. Sip coffee. Nod along. Say very little. Walk away looking busy without having contributed anything meaningful and, ideally, leave with no action items.
Strong leaders must recognize this dynamic. Meetings that exist to signal activity, rather than to produce outcomes, are organizational quicksand.
Shorter Meetings, Sharper Thinking: 30 is the new 60
Even when a meeting is necessary, its default length is almost always too long. Why is everything an hour long?
A half-hour often feels “too short,” so we pad it out. But work expands to fill the time available. Long meetings invite non-value-added conversation, tangents, and repetition. A simple discipline helps immensely: default to 30-minute meetings.
Not because you want more meetings, but because you want less wasted time. You’ll be amazed at how much faster people get to the point. Even if some meetings run 37 to 40 minutes, the cumulative time savings over a year are substantial.
Relationship-building and informal conversation still matter, but they shouldn’t crowd out clarity or momentum.
End the Meeting When the Work Is Done
In most companies, leaving a meeting early is considered rude. In high-performing organizations, it’s considered responsible behavior.
At Tesla, for example, employees are encouraged to leave meetings as soon as they’re no longer adding value, and staying when you’re not needed wastes time—yours and others’.
Leaders play a critical role here. When the meeting’s purpose is achieved, end it. Ring the bell. Close the loop. Send people back to real work.
Contrast this with the modern habit of saying, “I’ll give you five minutes back.” As if five reclaimed minutes could compensate for a poorly designed meeting in the first place.
What Meetings Are Actually For
There is a strong reason to hold a meeting: to make a decision that truly matters. Amazon gets this right. People gather and share information before the meeting. People read it in advance. The meeting itself is reserved for discussion, trade-offs, and decision-making—not death by PowerPoint. That’s a worthwhile meeting, where work gets done.
The meeting isn’t about presenting work. It’s about making decisions. If no decision is required, be ruthless in questioning whether the meeting should exist at all. Every high-quality meeting should end with absolute clarity on four points:
- What did we decide?
- What are we going to do about it?
- Who owns the next step, by when?
- How will we communicate the decisions we made?
If you reach the end of a meeting without clear decisions or actions, you have to ask a hard question: Why were we here? Consider immediately terminating this meeting type.
With AI notetakers now automatically capturing discussion and action items, there’s no excuse for ambiguity. The technology is available. What’s required is discipline.
A Leadership Issue, Not a Scheduling Issue
Meeting culture doesn’t change from the bottom up. It changes when leaders model a new standard. If senior leaders treat meetings as the work, everyone else will follow. If leaders show that meetings are only a tool—and often an overused one—the culture will follow.
One practical exercise: audit your calendar. Which meetings are for information transfer? Shrink or eliminate them. Which meetings are decision-critical? Protect them—and make them sharper. As a senior leader, you will get invited to meetings because your presence makes the meeting important. Resist those curtain calls.
Time is your organization’s most finite resource. How you treat meetings signals what you value, and that signal is often louder than you think.
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