You spend 27% of your working week in meetings. That figure comes from Fellow, a Canadian company that analysed 50,000 office workers' calendars. In 2019 the same workers averaged 7.5 meetings a week. By 2025 it was 13.6. The number nearly doubled in five years, and most of those years were supposedly the years when we were rethinking work.
I've been reading about meetings. Not how to run them better — though there's plenty of that — but why they've become what they are, what they actually cost, and whether any of the fixes on offer will stick.
Here's the reading list. It's annotated. Make of that what you will.
The foundational text
Where to start
Antony Jay wrote How to Run a Meeting for the Harvard Business Review in March 1976. He estimated 11 million meetings happened every day in the US. He thought most of them were badly run. He was right fifty years ago and he's right now.
The piece is short. If you haven't read it, read it before you read anything else. The core argument: meetings fail not because people are lazy or stupid, but because no one has thought clearly about what kind of meeting is needed and what it is supposed to decide.
Harvard Business Review · March 1976
How to Run a Meeting — Antony Jay
The original. Short enough to read in 20 minutes, relevant enough to have survived fifty years. The core insight: meetings fail not from laziness but from absent design.
The scale of the problem
The data is not encouraging
14.8h
avg. meeting time per week
Flowtrace, 2025
£48bn
unproductive meeting cost, UK annually
London School of Economics
5h
wasted in unproductive meetings per week
Speakwise, 2026
23 min
average recovery time after a meeting
Fellow, 2025
The London School of Economics put a number on the unproductive portion: £48 billion a year in the UK, $259 billion in the US. That is more than the UK spends on defence.
Fellow's 2025 meeting statistics are worth a slow read. Ninety percent of knowledge workers experience post-meeting exhaustion. A 30-minute meeting doesn't cost 30 minutes — it costs 30 minutes plus an average of 23 minutes of recovery time.
Speakwise's 2026 meeting overload report puts hours wasted in unproductive meetings at double the 2019 figure: five hours a week per employee. That's 260 hours a year. Six and a half working weeks.
The Covid acceleration
The pandemic didn't create the problem. It amplified it.
Zoom went from 10 million meeting participants a day in December 2019 to approximately 300 million in April 2020. The research on what that did to people is now substantial.
This SAGE Journals study on virtual meetings during Covid is the most balanced I've found: it covers what worked, what didn't, and why the habits stuck. The short version: video meetings reduced travel and improved some forms of flexibility, while simultaneously making it harder to read the room, harder to end a meeting, and much easier to call one.
Zoom fatigue turned out to be real — and measurable. The cognitive load of sustained eye contact on a grid of faces, combined with the absence of peripheral motion, genuinely depletes people.
The experiments
Why the fixes don't stick
Shopify's 2023 experiment — deleting all recurring meetings, banning meetings on Wednesdays, putting a live dollar cost on every calendar invite — is the most documented corporate attempt to reform meeting culture. NPR covered the announcement well. Fast Company followed up on how it actually went. The gap between those two pieces is instructive.
The honest takeaway from almost every experiment: meeting reduction works until it doesn't. The problem creeps back because the underlying incentives — status, control, the fear of missing out — haven't changed.
The thing everyone avoids saying
The meeting is the symptom, not the cause
Meetings are where organisational politics happen. They are where decisions get made visible, where inclusion gets performed, where people signal that they belong. Cutting meetings without changing what they represent is like treating a symptom. The meeting isn't the cause. It's the symptom.
"Meetings are the front lines of inclusion. When we talk about banning them, we're talking about removing the main venue for something people need."
Steven Rogelberg — The Surprising Science of Meetings, University of North Carolina
That doesn't mean all meetings are good. Most aren't. It means the solution isn't subtraction — it's design.