If a leader in a global company spends most of their days in back to back thirty minute slots, a calendar shows that something is generating meetings, but not what or why. So I want to look inside one of those slots and ask a plainer question: why did the default become a live meeting, online or face to face, everyone there at once, instead of something written down that people could read and think about on their own time?
No energy left to write anything down
I think part of the answer is less flattering than urgent. A person moving from one thirty minute slot straight into the next has had no time to read anything properly in between. No time to sit with a proposal, think about what is actually being asked, and write back something considered.
And it is not just about the missing hours. Back to back context switching all day does not simply use up time, it uses up the actual cognitive capacity that careful reading and writing would require. By evening there is often no reserve left to do outside the hours what the day itself never made room for, because the day already spent it.
A meeting does not require any of that depleted capacity. You can walk in cold and wing it, which is a much lower bar than being expected to arrive with an actual opinion already formed.
Whose time gets spent doing the thinking
That choice says something about how people value each other’s time, not just their own. A written answer, thought through in advance, respects everyone else’s time by doing the hard part in private before asking anyone else to spend a minute on it. A meeting called instead often does the opposite. It moves the thinking into the room itself, and asks everyone else present to sit through someone else’s first draft of a thought, live, simply because that person never carved out the space to have it in advance.
Not every reason is a character flaw
Sometimes it really is timezone arithmetic. Teams are spread far enough apart that the overlapping hours in a day are scarce, and everyone is competing for the same few. Sometimes it is a leader who never built the skillset remote leadership requires, and leans on meetings to cover a gap in their own ability, then blames remote work for it.
That does not touch the harder question. If someone has not had the time to read the problem, can they make the decision at all, or give a real opinion, just because they are in the room? Somewhere in most organisations there is an unwritten rule nobody remembers agreeing to: ask first, and ask in person. It accumulated one small moment at a time, until presence became the proof of diligence and a carefully considered written answer stopped counting for as much as simply being there when the decision happened. A calendar that only allows for presence is quietly asking everyone in it to decide things they were never given room to consider.
Be honest with yourself about your last few meetings. Did you go to one just to catch up on the work the previous meeting stopped you doing? Were you doing something completely different, even with the camera on? Or did you leave the camera off so you wouldn’t get caught?
The gap between the value on the wall and what gets rewarded
Most organisations put versions of the same few values on the wall: integrity, accountability, innovation, teamwork, respect. Then someone makes a decision inside the authority they were told they had, and the first thing that comes back is a question. Have you anchored this with the stakeholders?
Sometimes that is a fair question. Some decisions do need other people’s input, and sometimes the authority was never as clear as it sounded. But sometimes it arrives after the fact, and what it really means is that the decision is no longer yours. What happens next tells you which one it was. If the decision stands, even with adjustments, the values held. If it quietly gets remade, everyone watching learns something about accountability and respect that no poster will undo.
Why almost nobody breaks the pattern
The pattern is simple: the live meeting wins over the written decision, even when the written one was well thought through. Breaking it means letting a considered decision stand, even when it wobbles, rather than pulling everyone back into a room to fix it live. That takes trust built in advance, on both sides, and kept through at least one visible mistake without retreat. Most organisations do not decide slowly because they cannot decide fast. They are unwilling to pay the price of trusting someone through the first mistake that shows whether the trust was real.
If you are lucky, you get a leader who gives you that freedom anyway. I have been there. I was lucky with the leader.
The thirty minutes worth protecting
Not every thirty minute slot is the problem. One-on-ones are the exception, and I would defend them against almost anything else on the calendar.
A one-on-one is the one meeting where presence is the point. It is where someone says the thing they would never put in writing, or never say in front of the team. Where you hear in the first two minutes that something is off, even though the status is green. Where trust gets built, or does not, week after week. No document replaces that.
In most meetings, being in the room, physically or online, stands in for having thought about the problem. In a good one-on-one, really being in the room is the whole job.
They go wrong in a recognisable way, though. They turn into status updates, a list that could have been an email, with one more person watching. And when the calendar gets tight, they are the first thing cancelled, because nothing visibly breaks that day. That says a lot about what the organisation thinks the meeting was for.
Is asynchronous work dead?
Somewhere along the way, writing something down stopped being how decisions get made. It became paperwork you produce after the meeting to justify what the meeting already decided.
That is not because documents stopped being useful. Almost nobody has the time or energy left to read one. A document sent into a calendar like this is a message in a bottle, addressed to someone with no reserve left to open it.
So who is it for? The careful proposal, the thoughtful email, the slide deck, with or without AI doing half the work now. Often it is filed away unread, until something goes wrong and someone needs to point to it and say the information was there, ownership was documented.
Maybe a simple, properly updated RACI matrix would do the same trick, for a fraction of the effort.
What happens to you inside it?
At some point you start believing your work is the meetings you have. You lose the actual reason you were in the room in the first place, and the room quietly becomes the whole job.
If your entire working day is made of being present somewhere, and nothing else, that tells you something. Either the organisation stopped trusting you with independent decisions and started requiring your presence instead, as a substitute for actual delegated authority. Or you, consciously or not, have let meetings replace the harder, slower, less visible work of thinking, because meetings produce the feeling of contribution instantly, while real thought takes longer to show any result at all.
Are you sure your latest meeting invitation could not have been an email?
