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Meetings Are Killing Your Business (And Your Soul): A Reformed Meeting Addict's Guide to Sanity

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Meetings are like chocolate biscuits at afternoon tea. One's fine, two's pushing it, but somehow you end up in a sugar coma wondering where your life went wrong.

I used to be that person. The one who called meetings about meetings. Who scheduled "quick catch-ups" that somehow stretched into two-hour philosophical debates about font choices. My calendar looked like a game of Tetris played by someone having a stroke.

But here's what seventeen years of managing teams across Brisbane, Sydney, and that one terrifying stint in Canberra taught me: most meetings aren't just unnecessary, they're actively destructive.

Let me share something that'll probably upset half of you reading this. The average Australian office worker spends 23 hours per week in meetings. Twenty-three bloody hours! That's more time than most people spend sleeping with their partners, and significantly less productive.

I learned this the hard way when I worked with a telecommunications company in Melbourne. Big mob, shall remain nameless, but they had meetings about everything. They had meetings to decide when to have meetings. The poor project managers looked like extras from The Walking Dead.

Here's my controversial take: if your meeting doesn't have a clear decision to make or action to assign, it's therapy, not work. And frankly, most of us aren't qualified therapists.

The Three-Question Test That Changed Everything

After watching too many talented people burn out from meeting overload, I developed what I call the Three-Question Test. Every meeting invitation has to answer:

What specific decision are we making?
Who has the authority to make that decision?
What happens if we don't meet at all?

If you can't answer all three in one sentence each, you don't need a meeting. You need clarity.

Sounds simple, right? Wrong. You'd be amazed how this tiny filter eliminates about 73% of corporate meetings. I've seen entire departments go from 40 meetings per week to 12, with productivity actually increasing.

The Stand-Up Revolution (Not That Agile Nonsense)

Now I know what you're thinking. "But Gary, what about team connection? What about collaboration?" Fair dinkum, I thought the same thing. Until I discovered the power of the 15-minute stand-up.

Not those painful Agile ceremonies where everyone recites their daily achievements like they're at confession. I'm talking about genuine stand-ups where people literally cannot sit down. Amazing how quickly humans get to the point when their legs start complaining.

Telstra actually pioneered some brilliant meeting innovations back in the day - their quick decision-making processes became legendary in the industry. They understood that effective delegation skills were more important than endless discussion.

Here's the thing about standing meetings: they force you to prioritise. When Sarah from accounting starts her usual fifteen-minute tangent about the new coffee machine, everyone's looking at their watches. Self-regulation kicks in naturally.

The Email Cop-Out That Actually Works

Sometimes the best meeting is no meeting at all. Shocking concept, I know.

I started something called "Email Decisions" where anything that could be resolved asynchronously got bounced back to email. Status updates? Email. Budget approvals under $5,000? Email. Debates about whether the Christmas party should have a theme? Definitely email.

The pushback was immediate. "But we need to discuss this!" No, Karen, you need to make a decision. There's a difference.

Within six months, our team's actual face-to-face time became focused on genuine problem-solving and creative work. The difference was staggering. People started leaving at 5 PM again. Revolutionary stuff.

Meeting Roles: Because Someone Has to Drive This Bus

Here's where most organisations get it spectacularly wrong. They treat meetings like democracy in action. Everyone gets a voice! Everyone's opinion matters! Beautiful sentiment, terrible for productivity.

In effective meetings, you need three roles:

The Decider (one person, maximum two)
The Information Provider (whoever has the data)
The Action Taker (whoever implements the decision)

Everyone else is tourism. Lovely to have along, but they're not essential to the journey.

I once worked with a construction firm in Perth where they had 12 people in weekly project meetings. Twelve! By the time everyone shared their updates, the projects had already moved on. We cut it to 4 people and suddenly decisions happened faster than a tradesman's lunch break.

Technology: Your Meeting's Best Friend or Worst Enemy

Video calls changed everything, didn't they? Suddenly every conversation needed a Zoom link. Even the ones that could've been sorted in a 30-second hallway chat.

But here's something most people miss: the mute button is the greatest meeting innovation since whiteboards. It forces people to actually listen instead of preparing their next interruption.

Although I have to admit, there's something deliciously Australian about seeing Karen's cat walk across her keyboard during budget presentations. Keeps things real.

The trick with virtual meetings is treating them like you would any other business appointment. Show up prepared, stick to the agenda, and for crying out loud, learn how to use the bloody technology before the meeting starts.

The Meeting After the Meeting (And How to Kill It)

You know what I'm talking about. The real decisions happen in the car park, over coffee, or in hushed conversations by the printer. Why? Because the actual meeting was too big, too formal, or too unfocused to achieve anything meaningful.

This drove me mental for years. Spending an hour in a room achieving nothing, only to sort the real issues in a five-minute corridor conversation afterwards.

The solution? Shrink your meetings. If more than six people are involved, you're running a conference, not making decisions. Break complex issues into smaller, focused discussions with the right people.

Cultural Differences: Why Some Meetings Actually Work

Working across different Australian markets taught me that meeting culture varies wildly. Brisbane tends toward longer, more relationship-focused discussions. Sydney's all business, rapid-fire decisions. Melbourne loves a good debate, sometimes for the sake of it.

Perth meetings often include those awkward pauses while everyone processes the decision. Nothing wrong with that - some of the best outcomes I've seen came from giving people thinking time instead of demanding immediate responses.

But regardless of location, the fundamentals remain the same: clear purpose, right people, defined outcome.

The Meeting Budget: Putting Dollar Signs on Decisions

Want to really shake things up? Start charging departments for meeting time based on participant salaries. A two-hour meeting with eight senior managers suddenly costs $2,400 in lost productivity. That quarterly review with the entire leadership team? You're looking at $15,000.

Most organisations would balk at spending that much on office furniture, but they'll blow it on poorly planned meetings without blinking.

I introduced this concept at a mid-sized firm in Adelaide. Not actual charges, just transparent costings included in meeting invitations. Meeting requests dropped 40% overnight. People suddenly became very precious about everyone's time.

When Meetings Actually Matter

Don't get me wrong - some meetings are absolutely essential. Crisis management, creative brainstorming, difficult conversations, major strategic decisions. These require human connection, real-time problem-solving, and the kind of nuanced communication that email can't handle.

The key is recognising which is which. If you're gathering people to share information that could be documented, you're doing it wrong. If you're bringing minds together to solve complex problems or navigate sensitive issues, you're doing it right.

I remember one particular crisis meeting when a major client threatened to pull their contract. Six people, one hour, three potential solutions discussed, one decision made, client saved. That's what meetings should accomplish.

Breaking the Meeting Addiction

Like any addiction, meeting dependency requires intervention. Start by going cold turkey on recurring meetings. Cancel everything scheduled for next week and only reschedule what absolutely cannot be handled another way.

You'll discover something liberating: most "urgent" issues resolve themselves or find alternative solutions when meetings aren't available as the default option.

Give people permission to decline meeting invitations if they don't see clear value in their attendance. Watch how quickly meeting organisers start getting specific about why each person needs to be there.

The goal isn't to eliminate meetings entirely - it's to make them purposeful, efficient, and actually useful. Revolutionary thinking in 2025, apparently.

The Meeting Manifesto

After years of optimising how teams communicate and make decisions, I've developed a simple manifesto:

Every meeting should leave participants clearer about what happens next than when they walked in. If people are more confused after your meeting than before, you've failed.

Default to asynchronous communication. Only meet when real-time interaction adds genuine value.

Respect people's time like you respect their expertise. Both are finite resources that shouldn't be wasted.

End meetings early when objectives are achieved. There's no prize for using the full allocated time.

The future belongs to organisations that can make decisions quickly, communicate clearly, and respect their people's time. Ironically, that future requires fewer meetings, not more.

Start tomorrow. Look at your calendar and ask yourself: what would happen if half these meetings simply didn't exist?

You might be surprised by the answer.

Looking to improve your team's meeting effectiveness and conflict resolution skills? Sometimes the real work happens in the conversations between the meetings.