There is a special category of professional suffering that doesn’t appear in occupational health literature but is immediately recognized by anyone who has spent more than three months working in a marketing or creative organization. It manifests as a faint but persistent feeling of wasted existence, triggered specifically by being in a meeting that should not be happening. Not a meeting that could be shorter. Not a meeting that could be better run. A meeting that should not exist at all, and which exists anyway, because calling a meeting is the default response to any situation where a decision needs to be made, information needs to be shared, or anyone needs to feel like they’re doing something.
The email-that-became-a-meeting is its purest expression. Someone needed to share information. Instead of writing it down and sending it — a process that would have taken fifteen minutes and produced a permanent, searchable record — they scheduled a thirty-minute slot in eight people’s calendars, consumed four hours of collective time, and produced no documentation whatsoever. The information was shared verbally, understood differently by each of the eight people present, and will need to be re-shared in some form within the next two weeks. This is not productivity. This is the appearance of productivity, which is its more expensive cousin.
Why We Keep Scheduling Meetings We Don’t Need
Understanding the persistence of the unnecessary meeting requires understanding what meetings actually provide beyond their stated purpose. Meetings are social. They create the feeling of collaboration, of collective effort, of shared mission. They are also, in many organizational cultures, proof of work — the calendar full of meetings signals a person who is important, in demand, involved in decisions. The inbox that generates meeting invitations is the inbox of someone who matters.
This means that reducing meetings is not simply a question of efficiency. It’s a question of organizational identity and status signaling. The senior leader who sends an email instead of calling a meeting may be communicating, inadvertently, that the matter isn’t important enough for their time. The manager who cancels a standing weekly team meeting may be perceived as disengaged rather than efficient. These cultural dynamics are real and they’re worth naming, because efficiency arguments alone rarely change meeting cultures. Culture change requires addressing what the meetings are actually doing for the people who call them.
The Taxonomy of Meetings That Shouldn’t Exist
Not all unnecessary meetings are created equal. They cluster into recognizable types that experienced professionals learn to identify, with varying degrees of ability to avoid them.
The Information Transmission Meeting. Someone has information. Instead of writing it down, they gather people to hear them say it. This is the most straightforwardly unnecessary of all meeting types. Information that can be written down should be written down. Writing is faster, searchable, asynchronous, and produces a record. Saying things in a meeting is none of those things. The only argument for the information-transmission meeting is that people don’t read their emails — which, if true in your organization, is a separate and more serious problem that calling more meetings will not solve.
The Alignment Meeting. This is the meeting called when a decision has already been made but needs to be felt to be collective. The alignment meeting is not about making a decision — that happened, usually by one or two people, before the meeting was scheduled. It’s about enrolling everyone else in the decision that’s already been made, while maintaining the fiction that the meeting is where decisions happen. These meetings are politically necessary in many organizations. They are never efficient, and the gap between their stated purpose and their actual purpose is a constant source of low-grade professional dissonance.
The Recurring Meeting That No Longer Has a Reason to Recur. This meeting existed for a reason once. That reason may have changed or disappeared entirely, but the meeting remains on the calendar because nobody has explicitly canceled it and doing so feels like killing something. These meetings accumulate in organizations the way unused subscriptions accumulate in bank accounts — quietly, regularly, draining resources for services no longer needed.
As we’ve argued in our analysis of Agile’s meeting culture problem, the standup that made sense in one context gets copy-pasted into contexts where it makes no sense at all. The ritual outlives its rationale because the rationale was never really the point.
The Real Cost in Creative Work
For creative professionals specifically, meetings carry a cost that doesn’t show up in any calendar calculation: the destruction of deep work time. As we noted in our piece on creative burnout, genuinely original thinking requires extended periods of uninterrupted concentration. A ninety-minute block of focused creative work produces qualitatively different output than three thirty-minute fragments separated by interruptions. A day with four meetings doesn’t have four hours of meeting time and four hours of work time. It has four hours of meeting time and four severely fragmented hours of partial attention.
The creative whose day is full of meetings isn’t working in meetings and working between meetings. They’re attending meetings and recovering from meetings. The net creative output is a fraction of what it would be with the same hours protected. This is not a personal productivity failure — it’s an environmental one, and it’s entirely preventable with organizational decisions that most organizations haven’t made.
What Actually Replaces the Meeting
The anti-meeting case is sometimes misread as an argument for isolation or asynchronous-only work. It isn’t. Real creative collaboration requires real-time interaction — the kind where ideas build on each other rapidly, where questions and answers happen in sequence, where the energy of a room (physical or virtual) creates conditions for thinking that don’t exist in a document or a thread. That kind of meeting is worth protecting precisely because it’s rare and valuable.
What replaces the unnecessary meeting is discipline about purpose. Before scheduling anything, a single question: what will exist after this meeting that doesn’t exist before it? If the answer is “people will have heard some information,” write the information down and send it. If the answer is “we will have reached a decision,” check whether that decision actually requires synchronous discussion or whether it requires one person to make a call and communicate it. If there’s no clear answer, the meeting probably shouldn’t happen.
The organizations that have genuinely reduced their meeting load — and there are some, though they’re not the majority — have almost universally reported the same result: people feel more productive, creative output improves, and the meetings that do happen are better because they’re the meetings that actually needed to happen. That’s not a coincidence. It’s just what happens when you remove the noise and let the signal through.
Just got out of a meeting that should have been an email? Our shop is for people processing exactly this kind of existential loss. You have our sympathy. And our products.
