The Sacred Ritual of the Unnecessary Meeting

Introduction: The Modern Workplace’s Most Time-Honored Ritual

Every office has one—that recurring calendar event with no clear agenda, no obvious purpose, and no one brave enough to cancel it. It appears weekly, sometimes daily, like a ghost from productivity’s past. No matter how many articles are written about how soul-crushing it is, it endures—the sacred ritual of the unnecessary meeting.

You know the one. It starts with a Zoom link. It ends with everyone wondering why they were invited. In between, there's a lot of polite nodding, a few muted mics, and at least one person saying, “Sorry, I was on mute,” after delivering a three-minute monologue to the void. Sometimes, there’s screen-sharing. Sometimes, someone’s cat walks across the keyboard. Sometimes, just for fun, someone says, “Let’s take this offline,” as if it’s a mic drop and not a vague threat.

We all joke about it. We make memes. We roll our eyes. But we keep doing it. Like some workplace rain dance, we gather in digital circles hoping something productive will fall from the sky.

This isn’t a rant. Okay, it’s partly a rant. But mostly, it’s a look at why these meetings persist, how they’ve come to dominate the modern workday, and what we might do to lift the curse. Because while collaboration is a beautiful thing, and communication is vital, not every moment of workplace existence needs to be documented in real time via webcam.

So before you click “accept” on yet another thirty-minute block of calendar chaos, let’s take a closer look at the strange phenomenon of meetings that don’t need to exist—but somehow always do.

The Anatomy of an Unnecessary Meeting

On the surface, it looks like a standard calendar invite. Innocent. Professional. Harmless. But crack it open, and you’ll find the internal organs of a classic time-waster laid bare. Welcome to the dissection table.

First, there's the subject line. It's either maddeningly vague (“Touch Base on Q2 Stuff”) or so overstuffed with buzzwords that it feels like a failed AI prompt (“Strategic Alignment Sync for Cross-Functional Growth Ops”). You enter with no idea what will be discussed but an overwhelming sense that someone, somewhere, will say “leverage” too many times.

Then comes the attendees list. It’s not just the people who need to be there. It’s everyone who's ever made eye contact with the topic. There are names you don’t recognize, someone from a different department entirely, and one person who always joins late from their car, adding nothing but engine noise and vibes.

The agenda, if it exists at all, was added as an afterthought—usually 30 seconds before the meeting starts. It reads more like a checklist of words someone heard in another meeting. “Updates. Feedback. Next steps.” No verbs. No context. Just nouns, floating in space.

You know you’re in deep when the screen-share begins. Tabs everywhere. Slack open. Spotify blaring. A browser window with so many pinned tabs it looks like the top of a piano. Someone opens a spreadsheet. It crashes. They apologize. You check your email. Someone else starts talking. You look up and realize the topic has shifted three times and no one noticed.

There’s always that one person who feels the need to fill silence with enthusiasm. “Great point.” “Love that.” “Totally agree.” They haven’t heard a word. They’re just keeping the pulse alive.

Finally, there’s the ending. “So... next steps?” someone asks, already regretting it. No one knows. Someone offers to “circle back.” There is no plan, no deliverable, no actual forward movement—just the sense that time has passed and entropy has won.

And then, like clockwork, the invite renews for next week.

Why We Keep Having Them (Even Though Everyone Hates Them)

We all know they’re a waste of time. We all have the data, the feelings, the slack messages typed mid-meeting that say, “This could have been an email.” And yet, the invites keep coming. We keep clicking “accept.” Why?

Part of it is habit. Meetings are the office equivalent of small talk—we do them because it feels weird not to. Cancelling a meeting can feel like skipping a family holiday. Sure, no one wants to go, but the guilt of breaking tradition keeps it alive.

Then there’s the illusion of productivity. Meetings feel like work. You’re talking. There are slides. Someone’s sharing their screen. Maybe there's even a decision made about something that might happen later. You emerge with a sense of participation as if proximity to a conversation is the same as contribution.

And let’s not underestimate the role of performative busyness. Being in meetings signals you’re in demand, involved, and important. Your calendar’s full? Wow, look at you. Never mind that half those meetings could be replaced by a single Slack message and a thumbs-up emoji. Being booked solid is modern office currency. But as we’ve learned from Multitasking: The Illusion of Productivity, looking busy and being productive are rarely the same thing.

There’s also the fear of being left out. FOMO in business casual. If a meeting is happening and you’re not there, what if decisions get made without you? What if someone misrepresents your work or, worse—volunteers you for something? So you attend, just in case. You listen. Just barely. And nothing happens. Just like last time.

And finally, meetings persist because no one wants to be the bad guy. Cancelling a meeting feels like an aggressive act. What if someone was looking forward to it? (They weren’t.) What if something important comes up? (It won’t.) So we hedge. We attend. We suffer. And we pretend we’re collaborating.

It’s not logic. It’s office mythology. And like any mythology, it’s powerful—until you start asking questions.

The Hidden Cost of Unnecessary Meetings

On the surface, an unnecessary meeting just seems like a minor inconvenience. A half-hour here, an hour there. A bit of your soul quietly dissolving in the background. But zoom out, and the cost starts to look a lot more like a corporate heist—except the thief is your own calendar.

Time, obviously, is the first casualty. A single one-hour meeting with ten attendees doesn’t cost one hour—it costs ten. Ten hours of collective brainpower scattered across Zoom rectangles, half of them muted and multitasking. Multiply that by the number of meetings in a week, and congratulations—you’ve invented a very inefficient way to burn payroll.

But it’s not just the time you spend in the meeting. It’s the time you lose around it. There’s the context-switching tax—getting pulled out of focused work, trying to remember what you were doing, and rebooting your brain after the meeting ends. One bad meeting in the middle of your morning can tank your whole day. It’s like dropping a bowling ball in a soufflé.

Then there’s the toll on energy. Meetings can be weirdly exhausting, especially the ones that don’t go anywhere. The psychological drain of nodding along while your inner monologue screams, “Why am I here?” is real. It chips away at motivation. It breeds cynicism. It makes people dread collaboration—not because they hate their coworkers, but because they’ve been trapped in too many pointless circles. And if the communication isn’t clear, the meeting isn’t just exhausting—it’s confusing. Clear Communication Boosts Productivity, and Morale dives deeper into how much clarity matters.

Creativity also suffers. Meetings, particularly the unnecessary kind, interrupt flow states. They carve up the day into tiny, unproductive chunks. And let’s be honest—very few breakthrough ideas are born while watching a screen-share of a slightly outdated pie chart.

There’s even reputational risk. When meetings become synonymous with inefficiency, people stop showing up mentally (if not physically). Participation drops. Engagement plummets. The very thing meetings are supposed to foster—alignment, collaboration, connection—becomes performative at best, corrosive at worst.

So yes, it’s “just a meeting.” But add them up, and they start to cost you more than time. They cost you momentum.

Types of Unnecessary Meetings: A Field Guide

Welcome to the wild. Here, in the tangled undergrowth of Outlook invites and Slack reminders, we find a thriving ecosystem of unnecessary meetings, each with its own strange behavior and call. Some are harmless. Some are mildly venomous. All are time-consuming. Let’s examine a few of the most common species.

The Weekly That Could Be an Email

This meeting exists out of sheer tradition. It happens every Monday at 10 a.m. without fail, like a sunrise you no longer enjoy. There is no new information. There is no agenda. There is, however, a person who insists on giving a recap of what everyone already knows, followed by ten minutes of awkward silence while people pretend to look thoughtful. The only real outcome is a renewed respect for bullet-pointed emails.

The Status Update Spiral

You’re there to “sync” or “touch base,” but what actually happens is an endless round of everyone describing what they did last week, are doing this week, or vaguely plan to do at some point in the future. Half the team zones out the moment it’s not their turn. One person accidentally unmutes themselves while chewing. Another’s video is angled straight up their nose. The full bingo card of Zoom Faux Pas is in play. No decisions are made, but everyone agrees it was “productive.”

The ‘We Just Wanted to Touch Base’ Summit

This one usually starts with, “We don’t really have anything specific—we just thought it would be good to connect.” Translation: someone panicked about losing visibility and summoned people to a digital séance. No agenda. No goal. Just vague feelings of collaboration and the sound of keyboards clicking as people work on other things during the call.

The Meeting to Plan the Next Meeting

Ah yes, the recursive ouroboros of workplace scheduling. You’ve come together to discuss when you can next come together. Several calendars are shared. Time zones are debated. No one has their availability handy. After 20 minutes of discussion, the only decision made is to create a Doodle poll, which half the team will ignore. The irony is delicious, if soul-destroying.

The Optional That Isn’t Optional

Technically, you don’t have to go. But you notice your manager’s name on the attendee list, along with a few people you’d rather not seem disengaged around. So you attend, camera on, face locked in mild interest. There is no actual role for you in the meeting. You say nothing. But you were there. And that’s the unspoken point.

The Brainstorm That’s Just a Vibe Check

You’re told this is a creative session, but what it actually turns into is a loosely organized ramble-fest where everyone throws out half-baked ideas with no structure, and the loudest voice dominates. Someone suggests “thinking outside the box” as if that’s an original concept. The session ends with a shared Google Doc no one will ever open again.

The Stakeholder Safari

This meeting includes every possible department, function, and satellite office, “just to make sure everyone’s in the loop.” No one is in the loop. The loop is now a tangled knot. People introduce themselves for 15 minutes, someone shares a 42-slide deck no one has seen before, and halfway through, it becomes clear that half the people thought the meeting was about something else entirely.

Each of these meetings began life with a purpose. But somewhere along the way, the purpose became diluted, distorted, or forgotten altogether. Now, they exist because they’ve always existed. They persist through a mixture of calendar inertia, social pressure, and unspoken fear of silence.

They are meetings for the sake of meetings. And they are everywhere.

How to Break the Cycle Without Becoming a Hermit

So, you've seen the patterns. You've identified the species. You're ready to delete half your calendar with the righteous fury of someone who’s just read a productivity book and had one too many iced coffees. But before you quit every meeting cold turkey and become the office recluse who only communicates in annotated PDFs, let’s talk strategy.

The goal isn’t to be anti-meeting. It’s to be anti-pointless meeting. There’s a difference.

First, ask the most radical, dangerous question in workplace culture: does this meeting need to happen at all? If the answer is “Well, it’s always been there,” cancel it. If the goal is unclear, postpone until it isn’t. And if the meeting is just to “check-in,” suggest a Slack thread. Or a shared doc. Or silence.

Next, ask for an agenda—yes, even for the short ones. A real agenda. Not just “updates.” Not just “brainstorm.” Something with structure, timeboxes, and preferably verbs. If someone sends an invite without one, ask for it. It’s not rude—it’s respectful of everyone’s time. If they can’t articulate a reason to meet, that’s your answer.

Then, rethink the guest list. Does everyone on the invite need to be there, or were they added out of guilt, obligation, or autocomplete? Smaller meetings are faster, sharper, and easier to keep on track. Plus, no one ever got mad about not being in a meeting.

Don’t be afraid to decline, either. Politely, professionally, with a note if needed: “I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute meaningfully to this one—happy to review notes afterward.” No one’s going to write a strongly worded HR report about your boundaries. And if they do, maybe they need fewer meetings, too.

For the meetings you do keep, tighten the format. Start on time. End early. Set expectations. Appoint someone to wrangle tangents. And if the meeting wraps before the clock runs out, don’t keep everyone hostage to fill the time. End it. Let people go. You’ll be a hero.

And remember the power of asynchronous communication. Updates don’t need to be spoken. Feedback can happen in a doc. Ideas can live on a shared board. If you’re aiming for actual engagement, not just time blocks, Mindful Meetings offers a useful rethink of what gathering with purpose looks like.

Breaking the cycle doesn’t mean becoming antisocial. It means treating meetings like tools, not habits. Like fire—useful when needed, dangerous when left unattended.

When Meetings Are Worth It (Yes, Sometimes They Are)

Let’s not throw the whole calendar out with the bandwidth bathwater. Not all meetings are time-wasting noise. Some are genuinely useful, even kind of magical—like a well-cast ensemble that actually shows up to rehearsal, listens, and builds something together.

The trick is knowing the difference.

Meetings shine when something needs real-time dialogue. When there’s complexity to unpack, nuance to explore, or tension to dissolve. You know, the kind of things that get lost in back-and-forth emails where everyone’s typing “just to clarify,” and no one’s actually clarifying anything.

Brainstorms—when done right—can be gold. Not the vague, free-for-all kind where someone suggests reinventing the brand as a pirate ship, but the focused kind. With structure. With constraints. With someone playing timekeeper and someone else making sure ideas don’t vanish into the ether.

One-on-ones? Invaluable. A good one-on-one is where coaching happens, concerns surface and ideas bubble up that would never survive the cacophony of a 12-person team call. They’re not status updates. They’re human updates.

Kickoffs deserve the space, too. When a team’s starting something new, there’s value in hearing voices, seeing faces, and syncing intentions before everyone wanders off into their own project silos. It sets tone. It builds alignment. And yes, sometimes it saves you three weeks of “Wait, what are we doing again?”

And then there are the moments you can’t plan for—the ones where a side comment turns into a breakthrough, where a misunderstanding gets cleared up instantly, or where someone finally says the thing no one was brave enough to put in writing.

The best meetings are short, clear, necessary, and kind of exciting. You leave with more energy than you brought in. You know what’s next. You remember why collaboration exists in the first place.

They’re rare. But they’re worth protecting.

Summing Up: Light the Sage, Cancel the Call

Meetings, in their purest form, are supposed to be moments of collaboration—time carved out to share ideas, solve problems, and move things forward. But somewhere along the way, they became something else. A placeholder for action. A stage for busyness. A recurring calendar appointment no one remembers setting.

We keep holding them out of habit, fear, politeness, or the hope that maybe, just maybe, this time someone will say something useful. And occasionally, they do. But more often, we walk away with a vague sense of déjà vu, a longer to-do list, and 43 minutes we’re not getting back.

This doesn’t mean meetings are evil. But it does mean they should be treated with intention. Designed, not defaulted. Questioned, not assumed. And occasionally, when appropriate, quietly removed from the calendar like an expired condiment from the office fridge.

As remote work has reshaped the way we communicate, meetings have multiplied—partly to compensate for lost hallway chats and impromptu check-ins. But as Remote Work and the Loss of Boo Radley reminds us, not every moment needs to be replaced. Some silence is sacred. Some space is necessary. And some connections are better built outside of a calendar invite.

So go ahead. Light the sage. Cancel the call. Or better yet, replace it with something meaningful. An agenda with teeth. A smaller guest list. A conversation that ends early and actually goes somewhere.

Because time is the only thing you can’t expense, use it wisely.