Packed Calendars, Wasted Time: How to Spot and Fix a Broken Meeting Culture
What I Learned as an Executive Assistant: The Anatomy of a Broken Meeting Culture
Back when I was an Executive Assistant, I was brought in to support a brand-new, high-stakes executive team. I sat in on my very first leadership meeting with them and saw the chaos firsthand. Executives were hopping on calls haphazardly, there was no agenda, and my SVP was just winging it. It was a masterclass in wasted time and inefficiency, all conducted at 6pm.
Their calendars were complete chaos, double (and sometimes triple) booked, back to back, and constantly conflicting. My executive felt he had to be in every meeting, which essentially screamed, "I don’t trust anyone else to get things done." Everyone was busy, but none of it actually moved the needle.
I knew this couldn't continue. I didn't just reshuffle their calendars; I completely revamped their meeting culture. I established new meeting cadences for everyone, created frameworks, and made follow-up templates so they could communicate progress asynchronously, eliminating the need for endless "update" calls.
The lesson? A calendar packed with meetings isn't a sign of a productive team; it's a sign of a broken system. True progress doesn't come from more meetings. It comes from making the few you have incredibly effective and eliminating the rest.
The "Calendar Cage": Why Unproductive Meetings Are More Than Just an Annoyance
That story of calendar chaos isn’t unique; it’s the daily reality for millions of professionals. The corporate calendar can feel like a cage, trapping workers in back-to-back, unproductive discussions that fragment the day and make focused work almost impossible. While researching this topic, I came across a forum where one employee described their typical day as "half my day in meetings, a quarter of my day reaching out to people, and the rest of the time coding," which forced them to work an extra two to four hours just to get their core tasks done.
This isn’t just a personal gripe; it’s a widespread symptom of “meeting overload,” a major thief of time and a signal of organizational inefficiency. Constant meetings, or preparing for them, create a system where employees are valued for looking busy rather than actually being productive. The result is a workforce that feels stuck, unable to do the deep work that drives career growth and meaningful impact. The frustration is real, with many professionals viewing these sessions as useless meetings designed more to justify managerial roles than to move the work forward. Yikes, truth hurts.
The LSS Reframe: Identifying the 3 Types of "Meeting Waste" Killing Your Productivity
To actually solve the problem of having too many meetings, we have to correctly diagnose it. This is not a time management problem; it's a systems problem. Using the lens of Lean Six Sigma (LSS), we can see that a culture of excessive meetings is a primary generator of Muda (Waste)—any activity that consumes resources but adds no value from the customer's perspective. When we look at unproductive meetings through this framework, three specific types of waste become immediately apparent.
Waste #1: Extra Processing (The "Could This Have Been an Email?" Meeting)
In LSS, "Extra Processing" is any effort that adds no value from the customer's viewpoint. This is the single most common form of meeting waste. It's the 30-minute status update that could have been a one-line Slack message. It’s the hour-long discussion to debate "the ins and outs of" a simple yes-or-no question. When organizations lack clear protocols for asynchronous communication, they default to meetings for everything, adding unnecessary steps and complexity to simple information transfers.
Waste #2: Waiting (The "Blocked Until We Meet" Bottleneck)
"Waiting" is defined as any non-productive time spent waiting for information, equipment, or people. In a meeting-heavy culture, the calendar itself becomes a source of this waste. Projects stall and momentum dies as teams are forced to wait for the next scheduled meeting to get an answer, receive feedback, or make a decision. Work that could be progressing continuously is instead processed in inefficient batches dictated by the weekly calendar. This creates a "hurry up and wait" dynamic that kills momentum and stifles initiative.
Waste #3: Underutilized People (The "Why Am I Even Here?" Meeting)
LSS identifies "Underutilized People" as the failure to harness the full mental and creative skills of employees. This waste is rampant in meetings with bloated invite lists. Every person sitting silently in a meeting they don't need to be in, their valuable skills and focus going untapped, represents a significant cost to the organization. When there's no clear process for defining who truly needs to be in a meeting, organizations default to inviting everyone "just in case," squandering their most valuable resource: employee attention.
The Proactive Blueprint: How to Have Effective Meetings That Actually Move Work Forward
To eliminate these forms of waste, we need to move from having meetings by default to designing them with precision. Research into what makes meetings productive reveals several foundational principles that can transform them from time-wasting chores into high-value collaborative sessions. The goal is to make every meeting a strategic tool, not a calendar filler.
Foundational Principles for All Effective Meetings
A review by the CIPD highlights a few key factors that actually make meetings work. There are lots of different meeting types, but today we’re focusing on three: Team Cadence, Progress Check, and One-on-One. Before we dive into the specifics, it helps to understand these core principles as they’re the foundation for every effective meeting:
Goal Clarity is Paramount: Meeting leaders must explain the importance of the topics on the agenda and what they hope to achieve. Setting specific, challenging goals is strongly associated with positive performance outcomes and team effectiveness.
Leader Behavior Sets the Tone: The behavior of the meeting leader has a great impact on its effectiveness. This includes being considerate, arriving early, avoiding monologues, paraphrasing comments to ensure understanding, and summarizing decisions at the end. The leader is responsible for creating an environment of fairness where attendees have opportunities to speak up, ask questions, and share ideas.
Punctuality Builds Trust: Lateness is harmful to meetings. It is linked to less effective outcomes, lower job satisfaction, and reduced psychological safety and trust among colleagues.
Frequency Matters More Than Duration: Interestingly, research suggests that meeting too often is more damaging to effectiveness and wellbeing than the length of the meetings themselves. It may be better to hold longer, less frequent meetings.
With these principles as our foundation, we can design specific frameworks for the three most common and critical meeting types.
Meeting Type 1: The Team Cadence Meeting
A team cadence meeting is a regularly scheduled meeting that provides the rhythm for the team's work. Its purpose is to keep everyone aligned, review progress against goals, and solve collective problems. To make it effective, it must be treated as a disciplined, value-added process, not a casual chat.
Purpose: To create a predictable forum for alignment, progress tracking, and issue resolution.
LSS Framework: This meeting is an exercise in Standardize-Do-Check-Act (SDCA) and Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). The agenda should be standardized (Standardize), the team reports on their work (Do), progress is reviewed against goals (Check), and new actions are decided upon to solve problems (Act).
Effective Agenda & Flow:
Check-in & Good News (5 mins): Start with small talk or positive humor to build connection and psychological safety.
Scorecard Review (5 mins): Quickly review the team's key metrics. Are we on track? This uses visual controls to make performance visible.
Progress Review (10 mins): Review progress on quarterly goals or major projects. This is a quick update, not a deep discussion.
Issue Identification & Resolution (35 mins): The most important part. Team members bring up roadblocks. The team collectively discusses and decides on solutions. This is Kaizen in action—a continuous improvement effort.
Recap & Cascade Message (5 mins): The leader summarizes key decisions and action items to ensure clarity.
Meeting Type 2: The Progress Check Meeting
Unlike a team cadence meeting, a progress check is specifically focused on a single project or initiative. It is a troubleshooting and alignment session, not a general status update.
Purpose: To review a specific project's health, identify blockers, and make decisions to keep it moving forward.
LSS Framework: This is a focused application of Kaizen for Process Troubleshooting. The entire meeting is about finding the root cause of problems and standardizing solutions.
Effective Agenda & Flow:
Goal Recap (2 mins): Start by restating the project's overall goal to ground the discussion.
"Status at a Glance" Review (5 mins): Use a simple traffic light system (Green, Yellow, Red) to quickly assess the project's health. This is another form of a visual control.
Blocker Deep Dive (20 mins): Focus exclusively on the "Red" and "Yellow" items. What are the specific issues? Who needs to act? This is the root cause analysis portion of the meeting.
Action & Commitment (3 mins): Clearly define the next steps, assign ownership, and set deadlines.
Meeting Type 3: The One-on-One Meeting
This is arguably the most important meeting a manager can have, but it is often misused as a simple status update. Its true purpose is to focus on the individual employee's growth, engagement, and well-being.
Purpose: To build trust, provide coaching and feedback, discuss career development, and remove personal roadblocks.
LSS Framework: This meeting directly addresses the waste of "Underutilized People" by focusing on an employee's skills, motivations, and growth. It also fosters the psychological safety necessary for employees to express themselves authentically and avoid "surface acting".
Effective Agenda & Flow: The agenda should be owned and driven by the employee, not the manager.
Employee's Topics (20 mins): The employee shares their wins, challenges, questions, and ideas. The manager's role is to listen, ask clarifying questions, and coach.
Manager's Topics (5 mins): The manager provides critical feedback, shares relevant company updates, and clarifies expectations.
Future & Career (5 mins): A dedicated space to discuss long-term goals, skill development, and career pathing.
The Ultimate Productivity Play: How to Reduce Meetings with Asynchronous Communication
Even the most effective meetings are still a synchronous activity, requiring everyone to be in the same place at the same time. The highest level of operational efficiency is achieved when you learn how to reduce meetings at work by embracing asynchronous communication. This directly addresses the employee desire for "a shared document or slack channel or something similar where you keep notes, track progress, and make comments and questions asynchronously". The goal is to shift from a culture that is synchronous by default to one that is asynchronous first.
Shifting from Synchronous by Default to Asynchronous First
This shift requires a new philosophy: treat meetings as a last resort. Before scheduling a meeting, ask a simple question: "Can the goal of this meeting be achieved in writing?" For status updates, progress reports, and simple information sharing, the answer is almost always yes. This is one of the most powerful alternatives to meetings. By establishing clear, standardized formats and a predictable cadence for written updates, you can eliminate a huge percentage of low-value meetings from the calendar.
Plug-and-Play "No-Meeting Update" Templates You Can Use Today
Instead of a 30-minute weekly status meeting, implement a written update using a standardized template. Here are two highly effective, condensed formats you can adapt for your team's needs, whether in email, Slack, or a project management tool.
Template 1: The "Status at a Glance"
Ideal for: Weekly project health checks or quick daily stand-ups.
Format:
Project: [Project Name]
Status: 🟢 Green (On Track) / 🟡 Yellow (Minor Delays) / 🔴 Red (Blocked)
Key Progress: [1-2 bullet points on top achievements since last update]
Blockers/Needs: [1-2 bullet points on critical issues & who needs to act]
Next 7 Days: [1-2 bullet points on highest priority next steps]
Template 2: The "Highlights & Headwinds"
Ideal for: Regular updates where you want a balanced view of successes and challenges.
Format:
Project: [Project Name] Update
Week Of: [Start Date]
Highlights (Wins): [1-2 bullet points on top successes/progress]
Headwinds (Challenges): [1-2 bullet points on main obstacles/risks]
Next Focus: [1-2 bullet points on what is being prioritized next]
By consistently using these templates, you provide clarity and predictability without consuming valuable synchronous time, effectively eliminating the "Extra Processing" waste from your update cycle.
The Reward: From a Calendar of Chaos to an Engine of Productivity
When you stop treating meetings as a default and start designing your communication systems with intention, the transformation is profound. The "calendar cage" opens. You and your team reclaim hours of fragmented time, allowing for the sustained "deep work" required for complex problem-solving and innovation. The constant pressure to be "in a meeting" subsides, reducing the burnout that forces dedicated employees into unpaid overtime.
Trust increases because clear, written communication replaces ambiguity. Autonomy grows because team members are empowered with the information they need to move work forward without waiting for the next meeting. Your calendar ceases to be a chaotic reflection of everyone else's priorities and becomes a strategic asset—a tool you use with precision to accomplish your most important work.
Your Next Step
Too many meetings. We’ve all felt it. It’s the sign that the way we communicate and get work done is broken. The good news is its fixable. A smart, data-driven approach can turn your meeting culture from a time suck into a productivity engine.
Today, we talked about Team Cadence, Progress Check, and One-on-One meetings. Next post I’ll cover Action Review meetings like retrospectives, after-action reviews, win/loss reviews, and Governance meetings like board meetings, quarterly strategic reviews, and QBRs.
What’s the one recurring meeting on your calendar you wish you could replace with an update you read instead of sit through?