Meeting Defrag: How to Stop Bad Meetings from Multiplying

How much are bad meetings actually costing your company? The real number is probably worse than you think, and the dollars aren't even the scary part. Bad meetings breed burnout, stall decisions, and have a nasty habit of multiplying.

This week, Alex and Moah dig into why meetings spiral out of control: the FOMO that keeps people showing up, the "meeting creep" that fills calendars without anyone noticing, and the cognitive recovery cost that makes a bad meeting even worse than the time it stole.

They introduce Meeting Defrag, a framework for leaders who suspect their team's calendar is working against them. You'll hear about the CEO who was almost fired because of a really bad meeting he ran, and what happened when one company deleted every recurring meeting (12,000 of them) in a single day. They leave you with a four-question checklist for evaluating whether any recurring meeting on your calendar deserves to stay there.

Plus: Moah surveys the Boomerang team about their own meetings and discovers what the team actually values about their daily standup, and it's not what you'd expect.

Links from the show!

Only 35% of people think they’d be missed in a given meeting https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work

Impact of Meeting Free days https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/102394/1/The%20Surprising%20Impact%20of%20Meeting-Free%20Days.pdf

Meeting Load Paradox https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681323001167

Calendly State of Meetings Report https://calendly.com/resources/guides/2024-state-of-meetings-report

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