Shall we jump on a call? The most expensive phrase you’ll hear in any company — a collective ritual that quietly destroys people’s productivity.
Not because meetings are useless. The problem is how effortlessly they become the default answer to everything. One ambiguous message, one decision that isn’t landing, one moment of doubt — and an invite appears on the calendar. Nobody stops to ask whether it’s actually necessary. It just happens. Meanwhile, we measure everything else with near-obsessive precision: ROI, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, conversion rates. Every number gets tracked, debated, optimised. But then there’s people’s time. Hours spent in meetings. And there, suddenly, we stop doing the math.
When you do the math, the result is less innocent than it looks. A one-hour meeting with six people in the room isn’t one hour — it’s six. And it doesn’t end when the call drops. There’s the time to mentally get in, the time to get back out, and the time to find the thread of whatever you were doing before. Work gets fractured, concentration drops, the day splinters. A single meeting can devour entire chunks of productive time without leaving anything concrete behind. And yet it gets treated as a neutral step — almost inevitable.
The point isn’t to abolish meetings. Some are genuinely necessary. When a decision needs to happen fast, when a direct exchange is the only way through, when there’s tension that needs to be addressed face to face — in those cases, talking together is the most direct path forward. The problem is that most meetings don’t come from any of that. They come from a lack of clarity. It’s not clear who decides, so half the team gets invited. It’s not clear what to do, so a discussion gets opened. It’s not clear what was said before, so everyone starts from scratch. The meeting becomes a way to buy time without admitting it.
There’s another layer, subtler than the first. Meetings work well as a protection mechanism. When enough people are in the room, responsibility gets diluted. If everyone participates, no one really decides. If something goes wrong, it’s hard to trace it back to any single point. This creates a feeling of safety — but it slows everything down. Decisions get pushed forward, problems stay open, the same conversations cycle back around. This isn’t random inefficiency. It’s a system that, in its own way, feeds itself.
You can see it clearly at the end of most calls. The last slide comes up, someone offers a vague summary, and then comes the line: “let’s sync again next week.” It’s a clean close, but an empty one. No decision, no clear direction — just a promise to pick it up later. And so the next meeting becomes inevitable. A chain forms where each meeting justifies the next, without anything actually getting resolved. The calendar fills up. The real work stays at the margins.
At that point, the question changes. It’s no longer “shall we jump on a call?” — it’s “why should we?” If there’s no precise answer, you probably don’t need one. A meeting only makes sense when something has to happen in that moment, with those specific people. If it can be written down, write it down. If one person can decide, let them decide. If it can wait without consequence, it probably wasn’t urgent.
Writing, incidentally, applies a healthy kind of pressure. It forces you to clarify the problem, choose your words, and commit to a position. You can’t stay vague the way you can in a spoken conversation. That’s exactly why so many people prefer the call: it lets you stall, adjust your argument on the fly, and avoid taking a clear stance. But it’s also why you so often end up nowhere. The written word stays. It can be read, referenced, challenged. It stops you from repeating the same thing to different people five times over.
Reducing meetings also means accepting a less comfortable shift: assigning clear ownership. Saying who decides what. Accepting that not everyone needs to be involved in everything. That doesn’t come naturally to most organisations, which tend to widen the circle rather than narrow it. But widening the circle usually slows things down. More people means more time to align, more difficulty reaching a conclusion. Involving everyone can look like inclusion — but it’s often just a way to avoid choosing.
Changing this habit doesn’t require a revolution. It just takes a small pause before sending an invite. Stop for a moment and ask yourself what you actually want to achieve. Whether you genuinely need to talk, or whether two well-written lines would do the job. At first it feels like an unnecessary step. Then it becomes automatic. Gradually, the number of meetings drops — but more importantly, their quality changes. The ones that matter stay. The ones that just fill time disappear.
When a meeting does survive that filter, it becomes easier to run well. Fewer people, less time, more clarity. You go in with an objective and come out with a decision. Not always a perfect one — but at least a concrete one. That’s what makes the difference: knowing what happens next. Without that, the meeting is just a parenthesis that leaves no trace.