How to Spend Less Time in Meetings and More Time Doing Work That Matters

Most companies have more meetings than they actually need. In many cases, a lot more.

I’ve seen it over and over again inside growing businesses. None of us set out to build a company where smart, ambitious people spend a huge chunk of their week sitting in meetings that don’t deserve to exist. And yet, it happens all the time.

At first, those meetings seem reasonable. That’s exactly why we say yes to them to begin with. Something breaks, a priority gets stuck, or a leader loses confidence that things are on track, so someone creates a meeting. That’s what you’re supposed to do when something feels off, right?

That meeting might help for a while. But then one meeting becomes three. Three become eight. Eight become a recurring conversation every Monday. It works just well enough in the beginning that nobody comes back later to ask whether it should still exist.

The truth is, when a lot of recurring meetings exist, it’s usually because something in the business still needs to be fixed. There may not be enough clarity, alignment, or transparency. Maybe the right people aren’t in the right seats. And instead of solving the real issue, a meeting just gives you another place to talk about it.

That’s where we need to pay more attention. Take a look at the list of recurring meetings across your company and ask what purpose each one is really serving. Start with this question:

Why do we need this meeting?

More often than not, the answer reveals something bigger about how your business is actually working. Let’s talk about that.

Some Meetings Earn Their Place

Let’s start with an important distinction: Not every meeting is a bad meeting.

Some meetings help your teams make decisions, align on priorities, and execute smarter. A single Weekly Team Meeting gives your team a chance to review priorities, solve issues, and decide what needs to happen next. Quarterly planning sessions help everyone get clear on what matters most over the next 90 days. And annual planning allows you to reconnect to the vision and make sure the business is headed in the right direction to achieve your long-term goals. These meetings are a necessary part of running a healthy company. They serve a purpose and actually support the work instead of getting in the way of it.

I’d put Tiger Teams in this category too. When a company is facing an important obstacle or working through a major priority, a focused cross-functional team that meets regularly to tackle the issue can be exactly the right answer. The key is that it exists for a real reason, has a specific outcome, and comes to an end when the job is done.

The problem starts when every challenge gets answered with another recurring meeting. A handoff gets missed, so a new check-in gets added. Two departments aren’t working well together, so now there's a standing check-in. A leader wants more confidence that things are moving, so another update call lands on the calendar. None of these decisions seem unreasonable on their own, but over time, those extra meetings start piling up. And once they do, the company starts to rely on meetings to compensate for issues it hasn’t solved yet.

That’s a line we need to watch carefully. There’s a big difference between meetings that help the business run well and meetings that exist because the business isn’t running well enough.

The Bigger Problem

This is where you need to get honest about what all those meetings are really telling you. When your calendar starts to get overloaded with meeting after meeting, it’s a sign the business is compensating for something that’s not working the way it should.

Sometimes it’s structural. Roles, accountabilities, and responsibilities aren’t clear enough, so people keep meeting just to stay aligned. Sometimes it’s operational. A process is inconsistent or a workflow breaks down often enough that the meeting becomes the patch. Sometimes it’s about visibility. Progress is hard to see, and leaders aren’t confident that what they’re hearing matches what’s actually happening.

Whatever the cause, the meeting is attempting to make up for something you should be solving another way.

I’ve been saying it for years: Some meetings (a lot of them) just suck, and we should be honest enough to say so. If two teams need a standing weekly meeting because they still can’t work well together, let’s stop pretending that meeting is some elegant management practice. It exists because something still needs work. If leaders need a separate recurring meeting because they don’t trust the reporting, that’s not just another meeting. It’s evidence that your operating system isn’t giving people the clarity or structure they need.

When a new meeting lands on your calendar, you need to ask: Is this meeting part of a healthy operating rhythm? Or is it a recurring reminder that we haven’t solved the real issue yet? That distinction matters because one kind of meeting helps the business move forward while the other keeps the business circling around the same problem.

The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.

Tim Cook

CEO of Apple

How to Spot Meetings That Shouldn’t Exist

Once you start looking at recurring meetings with a new lens, the next step is to review them with more discipline. Most teams don’t do this often enough. A meeting gets created for a reason, it stays on the calendar, and after a while it starts to feel permanent. But very few recurring meetings deserve that kind of permanence.

This is why we can’t just ask whether a meeting feels useful. We need to assess what the meeting is actually doing for the business and whether it should still be doing that job at all. A recurring meeting should have a clear purpose, a clear owner, and a clear reason to keep existing. If it doesn’t, it’s taking up time and energy that should be given back to the team.

A simple way to evaluate a recurring meeting is to ask a few direct questions:

• What specific problem is this meeting solving?

• If this meeting disappeared tomorrow, what would actually break?

• Is this meeting helping us make decisions, solve issues, or stay aligned on meaningful work?

• Is this meeting covering for a structure, process, or people issue we haven’t dealt with yet?
• Could the information in this meeting be handled better by our operating system instead of a conversation?

• If we were building the company from scratch today, would we create this meeting again?

Every recurring meeting costs time, attention, and energy. Multiply that cost across a leadership team, or across an entire company, and the number gets big fast. These questions force you to take a look at whether the meeting is really the best use of everyone’s time.

By reevaluating each and every recurring meeting you have, you’re not just cleaning up a calendar. You’re deciding whether your company will run on clarity and accountability or on repeated conversations that should no longer be necessary.

Why You Need Better Systems

The healthiest companies don’t run on constant conversation. They run on a shared understanding of what matters, who owns what, and how progress is being measured. People can see priorities. They know where accountability sits. They can tell whether the work is moving or not without another meeting to interpret the situation for them.

When those things are working, teams don’t need nearly as many recurring meetings to stay aligned. There's no asking for update calls because the important information is already available. They aren’t adding extra check-ins because accountability is already clear. And the team doesn't need to rely on a weekly conversation to patch over the same issue again and again.

This is one of the real benefits of a strong operating system. When the system is doing its job, meetings stop carrying so much weight. They no longer serve as the place where people go to figure out what's happening, who owns what, or whether anything is actually on track. Instead, meetings become what they should have been all along: a place to make decisions, solve issues, and help the business move forward.

That’s also why tools like Ninety can be so valuable for growing companies. A strong operating system like Ninety doesn’t just give you a place to keep track of priorities. It helps create the visibility, accountability, and discipline growing teams need if they want to spend less time talking about the work and more time actually doing it. 

Fewer Meetings, Better Work

The goal isn’t to get rid of meetings altogether. It’s to build a company that doesn’t need so many of them just to stay on track.

Keep the meetings that help your team make decisions, solve issues, and stay aligned on what matters most. But take a hard look at all the other recurring meetings that have found their way onto the calendar over time.

Because in most cases, those meetings are telling you something. They’re pointing to a place where the business still needs more clarity, better structure, stronger accountability, or a more reliable system. An extra meeting may feel productive and might even be helpful for a while. But that doesn’t mean it belongs forever.

We need to pay more attention. Because every meeting is either supporting a healthy operating rhythm or making up for something the company hasn’t solved yet. That’s why this question matters so much: Why do we need this meeting?

Asked often enough, and answered honestly enough, it can help you build a company where people spend less time in meetings and more time doing the work that actually matters.