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Meetings are supposed to help people do their jobs. But too often, they seem to have the opposite effect.
Most professionals know the feeling: You look at your calendar in the morning and wonder when, exactly, you’re supposed to get your actual work done. A meeting runs an hour because, well, someone scheduled it for an hour. Ten people attend because they were invited last time. Travis spends 15 minutes giving an update that could have taken five. And then another meeting gets scheduled to clarify what happened in the first one.
Two-thirds of executives consider meetings their No. 1 time sink, according to the 2026 World’s Most Admired Companies report from organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry and Fortune. They tend to “hijack prime focus time,” with 50% taking place between 9 and 11 a.m. or 1 and 3 p.m., per Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index research.
I’m an executive communication coach, and companies hire me to help teams communicate more efficiently. Here are the four steps I recommend most often to streamline their meetings.
1. Reassess every standing meeting
Recurring meetings acquire a strange kind of immortality. Someone schedules a weekly meeting. Six months later, nobody remembers exactly why it started, but 12 people still show up every Tuesday at 10 a.m.
Take a look at every recurring meeting on your calendar. If you own the meeting, or have influence with the person who does, ask:
- Does it really need to happen?
- What would happen if it didn’t?
- Does it need to happen every week?
- Does everyone invited truly need to attend?
- What would happen if it were 20% or even 50% shorter?
Meetings tend to expand to fill the time allotted, in my experience. If you challenge the assumption that meetings — recurring or otherwise — require the typical one-hour or half-hour meeting blocks, and instead schedule them for shorter lengths of time, people tend to adapt.
2. Never hold a meeting without knowing the goal
Every meeting should have an owner. That person should be able to answer three questions, in one sentence each, before anyone arrives:
- Why are we meeting?
- What needs to happen during the meeting, and in what order?
- What should everyone know or do differently when it ends?
That means circulating an agenda in advance if you’re the organizer or asking for one if you’re not. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. In fact, the simpler the better. If the purpose of the meeting is to make a decision, say what decision needs to be made. If it’s to solve a problem, define the problem. If people need to prepare beforehand, tell them what to do.
The biggest mistake I see is confusing a subject with an objective. “Q3 marketing” is a subject. “Selecting which two Q3 campaigns we’re funding” is an objective. The latter tells participants why they’re coming to the meeting and how to prepare.
3. Speak more succinctly
Most people have a very difficult time streamlining their remarks. The speaker whose update could be delivered in three minutes often takes 10. A participant asked a yes-or-no question starts explaining every factor and event that went into their answer.
You can help shrink meeting time by speaking more concisely yourself and, if you’re a manager or leader, coaching your employees to do the same. As you prepare what to say in every meeting, focus on two things:
- What does the audience already know or not know about what I’m saying? This helps you avoid repeating information people already know while ensuring everyone is up to speed
- What do I want them to know and do? Be clear about why you’re talking and what you want from the people you’re talking to.
When someone asks you a question, try responding with the conclusion first, then the supporting evidence or context.
- Instead of: “Well, we’ve been talking to the client for a few weeks, and there have been several different conversations, and I know we originally thought we might have something by Friday…”
- Try: “They said they’d decide next Wednesday.” Then explain why.
When people learn to communicate this way, I’ve seen a 12-minute contribution become nine minutes. Nine can eventually become six. Multiply those minutes across eight people, three meetings and 50 weeks a year, and the savings become significant.
4. Ask people if the meeting was any good
If a meeting is yours or if your team’s time is at stake, ask participants two simple questions:
- What was the main takeaway? Gauge whether the meeting achieved the intended goal. If five people left with five different understandings of what was decided, it probably wasn’t very effective.
- What could you or the person running the meeting have done to make it shorter or more effective? If attendees felt the agenda was unclear, if one or two people dominated the conversation or if you spent too much time on an issue that half the invitees had already discussed in another forum, that’s helpful information.
One team I worked with eventually cut its meeting time by roughly 25% after following these steps and making sure people stuck with their new habits. The investment required was minimal. They simply became more intentional about their meetings, then held each other accountable — in a constructive rather than punitive way.
That’s the larger lesson. Inefficient meetings aren’t usually caused by lazy or incompetent people. They happen because teams seldom slow down to systematically examine how their meetings work.
Whether you’re the CEO, a middle manager or an individual contributor, you can try implementing some of these fixes to reduce meeting bloat and reclaim wasted work time.
John Bowe is an executive communication and presentation coach, award-winning journalist, and author of “I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection.” He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications.
