Having “too many meetings” is unavoidable, but managing them well isn’t.

Enduring numerous meetings becomes a necessary evil when collaborating as a team or organization. They seem to proliferate like the Hydra from Greek mythology: once one meeting concludes, two more are already scheduled as follow-ups. Consequently, our calendars are packed, and we all suffer from what we call “meeting fever.”

It might be tempting to dismiss meetings entirely and offer a solution promising to “spend less time in meetings,” “have more productive meetings,” or “just cancel them all with our asynchronous meeting solution.” Well, it’s not that easy. If we were to ask users whether they want to have “fewer, more efficient meetings,” everybody would say “yes, of course!” But meetings are our collective guilty pleasure—it’s the time when we bond at work, exchange backchannel information, and keep each other updated. A little like the time between classes in school: you just don’t want to miss it.

Hence, we must accept that having “too many meetings” is just part of our work life, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to improve the status quo. We’ve realized that most of our meeting fatigue can be attributed to poor organization and administrative hassles. We all know that every meeting should have an agenda, somebody should take notes, and afterward, we should distribute our meeting protocol to everyone involved to increase accountability. But it’s just too much pain to do this constantly for every meeting.