Too Many Meetings? How to Stop The Meeting Madness

From Mammoth Hunts to Memos

We’ve been holding meetings since we were hunched in caves, hunting mammoths. To bring down a beast that size, by no means an impromptu task, people had to know what to do and when to do it. When we left the nomadic lifestyle and started settling in villages around 12,000 years ago, those survival briefings transitioned to structured councils where larger ideas could surface.

The Greeks invented the agora, which means “open place for assembly.” On this broad public square, crossed by paths and ringed with long colonnaded halls, with a council house, fountains, and shrines, people debated politics and traded ideas, paving the way for the birth of philosophy and democracy, among other great things.

We swapped colonnades for call links. Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom are our modern agora. But the once-useful assembly instinct has swollen into a default that drains attention instead of directing it. And it keeps getting worse.

The Meeting Trap Quantified

There is broad agreement across psychology, sociology, and management research that we spend too much time in ineffective meetings. 

• Meetings make us unhappy. A research summary published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) finds that meeting frequency links to lower effectiveness, lower satisfaction, and poorer well-being.
  
  

• Executive time is soaring. An article in the Harvard Business Review shows executives now spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, compared with under 10 hours in the 1960s.
  
  

• The cost is huge. The Doodle State of Meetings 2019 report concludes that poorly-organized meetings cost U.S. organizations about 399 billion dollars per year.
  
  

• More meetings lead to longer days. A large-scale study of 3.1 million workers across 16 major cities shows that during the early pandemic, the average workday grew by 48.5 minutes as meeting counts rose 12.9%. 

Employees get frustrated by too many meetings, especially when their role is undefined. Companies burn productivity and morale. It’s a negative feedback loop in which lack of prep yields no decisions, no decisions trigger follow-ups, and follow-ups crowd out real work.

How Many Meetings Are Too Many?

There is no firm limit, but a general guardrail is to cap meetings at 20% of total working time. Once you hit the 20% threshold, each extra invite tends to chip away at energy, attention, and trust. Still, one day of meetings out of five working days is a lot, especially when most meetings lack a clear purpose or outcome. 

Another way of keeping meetings in check is to apply the one-touch rule: one standing meeting per relationship per week. That means one meeting with your manager, one with your team, one with each partner department, and so forth. The constraint demands clearer goals and better preparations, which improves meeting quality and lowers the appetite for extras.

Of course, what counts as too many meetings depends on the kind of work you do and the decisions you need to make. The point when meetings become hurtful rather than helpful varies by the work: sales lives on cadence and can carry more meetings before performance dips; lab work runs on deep focus and hits the drop-off much sooner.

This variation by role underscores a broader principle: what truly matters is identifying the “sweet spot” for your context. 

Finding the Sweet Spot

Studies indicate that as meeting volume grows, teams initially gain from shared context, boosted creativity, and faster alignment; beyond a threshold, however, the marginal meeting fragments focus, reduce idea generation, and delay decisions.

The resulting pattern is an inverted-U: ∩. Teams should aim to position themselves at the peak of the curve before the tipping point. This is the sweet spot where you capture the benefits of meetings without the negatives of too many meetings.

The safest way to stay near the sweet spot, whatever the work, is to meet only when necessary. That is a difficult skill to master, given habits, vague agendas, and visibility politics.

AI Tools Can Save Companies Millions

One effective way to identify the sweet spot is to employ AI tools that make meeting quality and frequency explicit.

Himala’s AI meeting agent was built on the idea that meetings should earn their slot, and be time-boxed, owner-led, and outcome-driven. Himala’s meeting-scoring feature helps you decide if a meeting has enough context and purpose to be worth having or if an async thread would do instead

Employees can rely on Himala’s readiness score to ensure they are as prepared as possible before entering a meeting. By flagging missing essentials, right-sizing the attendee list, auto-drafting a tight agenda, pulling the relevant docs into one place, and setting a realistic timebox with clear next steps, Himala trades volume for quality, turning fewer, shorter meetings into sharper outcomes

About one-third of meetings are unnecessary, costing roughly 25,000 dollars per professional per year. If a company with 100 employees runs at that rate, it’s 2.5 million dollars a year, and trimming just 10% saves about 250,000.

The Meeting Necessity Checklist

Most teams don’t set out to overschedule; they drift there. The antidote is simple: a shared standard for what earns meeting time. 

Use this checklist to decide:

• Purpose. You can state the objective in one clear sentence. If you cannot express the goal succinctly, you are not ready to meet.

• Decision. A specific choice will be made in the room, with an agreed-upon owner and date. If no decision is expected, do not schedule a meeting.

• Owner. One person is accountable for the outcome and for circulating the result afterward. If ownership is unclear, postpone until it is settled.

• Complexity. You tried to write it up, and the issue still resists clarity. A live exchange is warranted to surface assumptions and unblock progress.

• Sensitivity. The topic carries tone and nuance, such as compensation, performance, or high-stakes trade-offs. Synchronous discussion reduces misinterpretation.

• Urgency. A timely decision is required, and an asynchronous exchange would be too slow. If speed is not essential, default to async and give people time to think.

A checklist like this is effective because it replaces habit with criteria, protects focus time, and ensures that the meetings you do hold are shorter.

Why Do We Keep Having Too Many Meetings?

We know that it’s bad for business and health, but we keep meeting. It’s partly psychology, partly habit. 

Meetings create the illusion of control and belonging, two things we lost during the pandemic. When offices closed, visibility vanished, and talking became proof of working, managers scheduled meetings to stay in touch, and employees joined to stay seen. The habit stuck. Even now, long after the urgency faded, the reflex remains: if in doubt, add a meeting. It feels safer than silence, even when everyone knows it’s slowing the work down.

At their best, meetings do what the Greeks built the agora for: air ideas, argue well, and leave with a plan. Perhaps what we should do is meet to fix the meeting itself?