Is sitting in back-to-back meetings actually part of your job — or does everyone just assume it is?

A senior executive sat across from me recently — impressive career, multiple board roles, significant responsibility — and made a remark I haven’t stopped thinking about.

“Some people,” she said quietly, “justify their salary by having meetings.”

It was said without malice. She wasn’t ranting. She was making an observation she’d reached after years of watching organisational behaviour from the inside. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I believe she’s identified something genuinely important.

The Meeting as Performance

Here’s the uncomfortable truth she was pointing at: for some people in some organisations, the meeting has become a performance of productivity rather than productivity itself.

Being seen to be in meetings — back-to-back, booked out, perpetually busy — has become a status signal in many workplaces. It communicates: I am important. People want my time. I am in demand. The packed calendar becomes a badge of seniority.

The problem is that attendance and contribution are not the same thing. Presence and productivity are not the same thing. You can fill every hour of a working week with meetings and still accomplish very little — if the meetings themselves are poorly structured, if decisions aren’t being made, if the same conversations are being had in rotation without resolution.

What the Research Actually Shows

Survey after survey, across industries and countries, shows that employees regard a significant proportion of the meetings they attend as a waste of time. The numbers vary by study, but they consistently sit between forty and seventy percent of meetings being considered unnecessary or unproductive by participants.

Think about what that means in practice. If you’re attending ten hours of meetings per week, and the research average holds, somewhere between four and seven of those hours are not returning meaningful value. That’s not a small problem. That’s a structural drain on organisational energy, attention, and output.

The Questions Worth Asking

If your role involves a significant amount of time in meetings, here are the questions worth sitting with honestly.

For each recurring meeting you chair or attend: what decision is this meeting designed to make? If there’s no clear answer to that question, the meeting’s purpose needs urgent examination.

Could this information be shared another way? A standing meeting that primarily delivers information could often be replaced by a well-written update. Meetings are expensive — they cost everyone’s time simultaneously. Reserve them for things that genuinely require real-time interaction and collective decision-making.

Who actually needs to be in the room? Attendance lists tend to grow over time, because adding people is easy and removing them is awkward. But every person in a meeting who doesn’t need to be there is a person not doing something more valuable.

What a Well-Run Meeting Actually Looks Like

A meeting that justifies everyone’s time has a clear purpose, a prepared agenda, participants who are ready to engage, decisions that get made, and actions that are assigned with accountability. It starts on time. It ends on time. People leave knowing what happened and what happens next.

This isn’t complicated. But it requires intentionality — someone willing to set the standard and hold to it, even when the cultural gravity pulls towards the comfortable sprawl of the open-ended discussion.

The Real Question

Is sitting in meetings part of your job description? In most cases, yes — some meetings are essential. But “some” is doing important work in that sentence. The question worth asking regularly, honestly, is whether the meetings you’re attending and running are genuinely worth the collective time they’re consuming.

Your answer might just reshape your calendar.