Short answer: no. Most of the meetings on your calendar right now shouldn't exist. Not because meetings are bad — because you're using them as a substitute for decisions you're avoiding, information you haven't bothered to write down, or trust you haven't built.
I've sat in thousands of meetings across two decades of leading teams and coaching executives. The pattern is always the same: the fewer decisions a leader is willing to make alone, the more meetings appear on their calendar. A packed diary isn't a sign of a busy, important leader. It's usually a sign of a leader who hasn't worked out what they're actually for.
A meeting is not a communication tool — that's the reframe that changes everything. It's a decision tool. If nothing needs to be decided, argued over, or built together in real time, you don't need a meeting — you need a message. Once you separate those two jobs, most of your calendar falls away on its own.
Why meetings multiply — the real reason
Meetings don't multiply because people love meetings. They multiply because they're the path of least resistance for a leader who's uncomfortable with three things: making a call without consensus, delivering information asynchronously and being held to it in writing, and trusting people to act without being watched do it.
Every recurring meeting is a proxy for one of those discomforts. A weekly 'status update' call is usually a trust problem dressed up as a communication ritual — the leader doesn't trust that work is happening unless they can see it happen live. A meeting 'to keep everyone in the loop' is an information problem the leader hasn't solved with a shared doc. And a meeting to 'align on direction' that happens every single week is a decision the leader hasn't actually made yet.
None of that is a personal criticism. It's structural. Most organisations reward visible activity over invisible judgement, so meetings — which are highly visible — get treated as proof of leadership, even when they produce nothing.
I see this most clearly with newly promoted leaders. In their first few months they inherit someone else's calendar template and keep every recurring invite out of caution — better to be seen in the room than to be the person who cancelled the thing everyone else assumed mattered. Eighteen months later they're still in those same meetings, still not sure why, because nobody ever asked whether the original reason still applied. Calendars accrete. Nobody ever audits them the way they'd audit a budget line, even though the cost — hours of senior time, every week, indefinitely — is often larger.
The other driver is subtler: meetings feel like control. If you're in the room, you can react in real time, redirect the conversation, catch a problem before it compounds. That feeling is real, but it's often an illusion of control rather than actual control — you're reacting to whatever raises in that hour, not the full picture, and you're doing it live, under time pressure, in front of an audience, which is the worst possible condition for good judgement. Written updates, read calmly, without an audience watching you react, usually produce better decisions than the same information delivered live in a room.
The three-question meeting filter I use with every client
- Is a decision actually required?: Not a discussion, not an update — a decision, with an owner and a deadline. If the honest answer is no, this isn't a meeting, it's a document.
- Does it require real-time back-and-forth?: Some decisions genuinely need people building on each other's thinking live. Most don't — they need one person doing the thinking and everyone else reacting async.
- Am I the reason this is recurring?: If you cancelled it for a month, what would actually break? If the honest answer is 'nothing', the meeting exists to reassure you, not to move the work.
- Could half the room contribute nothing and still be invited?: If most attendees are there to 'stay informed' rather than to decide or build, you've turned a decision forum into a broadcast — and broadcasts don't need a room.
- Would I defend this meeting's existence to the people in it?: Say out loud, to their faces, why this meeting needs to keep happening weekly. If you can't, don't schedule it weekly.
The meetings worth keeping
I'm not anti-meeting. Some conversations genuinely need a room — physical or virtual — and trying to replace them with a shared document is its own failure mode. Difficult conversations, genuine debate where people need to hear tone and challenge each other in real time, and fast-moving decisions under real uncertainty all belong in a meeting. So does relationship-building — teams that never talk face to face don't build the trust that makes async work possible in the first place.
The test isn't whether the topic is important. Plenty of important things don't need a meeting — they need a well-written update and a deadline for objections. The test is whether the room itself adds something a document can't: real-time judgement, visible commitment, or the kind of trust-building that only happens when people are watching each other think.
A good rule: if you could send the material 24 hours in advance and collect written reactions, and the only thing missing would be 'discussion', ask whether that discussion needs synchronous time at all, or whether it needs one well-run thread. Reserve the room for genuine disagreement, genuine ambiguity, or genuine relationship investment. Everything else is an email wearing a meeting's clothes.
I'd also push back on the idea that shorter is automatically better. A well-run ninety-minute session where a leadership team genuinely wrestles with a hard trade-off is worth more than six fifteen-minute 'quick syncs' that never get past status updates. The problem was never meeting length. It's meeting frequency without purpose, and the habit of defaulting to a recurring slot instead of asking what this specific conversation actually needs.
What I tell leaders who say 'but my team wants meetings'
This comes up constantly in coaching conversations. A leader tells me their team actually asks for more meetings, more check-ins, more visibility. I believe them — and I don't think it means meetings are working. It usually means the team doesn't trust that information will reach them any other way, so they've learned to demand a recurring slot as insurance.
That's a symptom worth treating differently. The fix isn't fewer meetings imposed from the top — that just removes the insurance policy without solving the underlying trust gap, and people will find another way to manufacture reassurance, usually through more one-to-ones or more Slack pinging. The fix is making the alternative to a meeting reliably better: a written update that actually lands on time, a decision log people can trust is current, a leader who answers questions in writing as fast as they'd answer them in a room. Once the alternative is trustworthy, the demand for meetings usually drops on its own, because people stop needing the room as proof that they haven't been forgotten.
I've watched this play out with a client who ran a weekly 90-minute leadership sync purely because the team had asked for 'more visibility' after a restructure the year before. We didn't cancel it outright — that would have reopened the anxiety it was papering over. Instead we replaced half of it with a Friday written update that named every open decision, who owned it, and when it would close. Within two months the team stopped bringing 'status' questions into the room at all, because the document already answered them faster and more completely than a live update ever could. The meeting that remained got shorter and sharper, because it only had room left for the things a document genuinely couldn't do — debate and disagreement.
- Meetings scheduled 'to keep everyone in the loop' are almost always an information design failure, not a communication necessity — fix the document, not the diary.
- A recurring meeting that survives being cancelled for a month without anyone noticing was never load-bearing.
- The size of a leader's calendar is not a proxy for their impact — it's often an inverse one.
- Teams that ask for more meetings are usually asking for reliability, not facetime; give them the first and the second stops mattering.
How to run the meetings you keep
- Name the decision before you send the invite — Put the actual decision or output in the invite title, not the topic. 'Decide Q3 hiring freeze scope' forces different behaviour than 'Q3 planning sync' — it tells people what they're accountable for producing before they walk in.
- Cut the room, not just the clock — Shortening a meeting from 60 to 30 minutes with the same ten attendees doesn't fix the core problem. Cut attendance to only the people who can actually make or block the decision, then let everyone else read the outcome.
- Circulate the material, not the agenda — An agenda tells people what will be discussed. Pre-reading lets them arrive with a position. Meetings run on positions are shorter than meetings run on first reactions.
- End with an owner and a date, every time — If a meeting ends without a named owner and a date, it wasn't a decision meeting — it was a discussion that will need another meeting. Notice that pattern and fix the format, not just the follow-up.
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Further reading: Digital Transformation - 3 Critical Actions for success
The distinction that actually matters
One line sums up what I want you to take from this: meetings are for decisions and disagreement, not for information and reassurance. Everything else follows from that split.
If you remember nothing else, remember this: a full calendar is not evidence of leadership. It's usually evidence that a leader hasn't built the systems — written updates that people trust, decisions made and logged without a room, delegation that doesn't need supervision — that would let the calendar empty out. The leaders I coach who run the leanest calendars aren't lazier or less involved. They've simply pushed more of the organisation's thinking into writing, where it's faster to produce, easier to challenge, and doesn't require ten people's attention at once.
I tell every client the same thing when they ask how to fix their meeting load: don't start by deleting meetings. Start by asking, for each one, which of the three discomforts it's covering for — an undelegated decision, an undocumented update, or an unbuilt trust relationship. Fix the underlying thing and the meeting usually cancels itself. Attack the meeting directly and it just comes back under a different name next quarter.
So — do you really need so many meetings? No. You need fewer decisions avoided, fewer updates left unwritten, and fewer teams left wondering if anyone's paying attention. Solve those and your calendar will look after itself.