Time Management Training for Remote Teams: What Works Best

Meeting Madness: How Australian Businesses Are Talking Themselves to Death

The meeting was supposed to start at 2 PM.

Australian businesses are literally talking themselves out of getting work done.

Walking through any modern workplace between 10 AM and 4 PM, you’ll see the same thing: empty desks and full meeting rooms.

That’s not including the opportunity cost of what doesn’t get done while everyone’s sitting around a table discussing things that could be resolved in a five-minute conversation. The meeting culture has become so entrenched that people feel guilty when they’re not in meetings. I’ve had managers tell me they don’t feel productive unless their calendar is completely booked with back-to-back sessions.

We’ve created a culture where being busy is more important than being productive.

What most managers refuse to acknowledge: the majority of them are just poor planning disguised as collaboration.

Remember that last “touch base” you sat through. How much actual useful communication happened? How many actionable outcomes emerged?

I’ll bet the first fifteen minutes were spent on updates, the middle section was dominated by whoever loves to hear themselves talk, and the final portion was a rushed attempt to assign actions that were probably unnecessary in the first place.

This isn’t collaboration – it’s collective procrastination for leaders who can’t make decisions outside of a formal setting. It’s management theatre, performed for an audience of captive staff.

Here’s a true story that perfectly captures the insanity of modern meeting culture:

I watched a operations group spend an hour in a meeting discussing why their previous meeting had run overtime.

The first meeting ran for two hours. The agenda covered eight different projects, most of which only involved two or three people in the room. By the end, everyone knew a little bit about everything, but nobody had the time to actually work on anything.

Within a month, they were having meetings to plan meetings, and follow-up meetings to discuss what was covered in the previous meetings. The project delays got worse, not better. The irony was completely lost on them. They genuinely couldn’t see that the meeting about meetings was the exact problem they were trying to solve.

Video conferencing technology was supposed to save us time, but it’s actually made meetings more frequent and less effective.

When meetings required physical presence, there was an automatic filter. That friction meant you only called meetings when they were genuinely necessary.

Now you can set up a video call in thirty seconds, invite dozens people with a few clicks, and create the illusion of progress without any of the logistical constraints that used to make people think twice.

The result? Meeting explosion. What used to be a quick conversation is now a video conference with action items. Every day is fragmented into hour-long chunks between various meetings.

What absolutely drives me mental about meeting culture: the assumption that more communication automatically leads to better results.

Excessive communication often creates more problems than it solves.

There’s a reason why the most creative companies – think Google in their early days – were famous for small teams.

Every concept needed to be presented in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was predictable work that had been focus-grouped into blandness. The best ideas died in the endless review processes.

Genius doesn’t happen in conference rooms full of committee members.

We’ve created a whole lexicon to make pointless gatherings sound essential.

“We should probably take this offline” – translation: “I haven’t thought this through, but I don’t want to look unprepared.”

{{“{Let’s get everyone in a room|We need all the stakeholders aligned|This requires a cross-functional approach}” – translation: “I’m afraid to make a decision, so let’s spread the responsibility around.”|The phrase “let’s unpack this” makes me want to {scream|lose my mind|run for the hills}.}}

“Let’s schedule a follow-up” – translation: “Nothing will actually change, but we’ll create the illusion of progress through scheduling.” It’s become corporate speak for “let’s turn a simple issue into an hour-long discussion that resolves nothing.”

This might be controversial, but hear me out: most “collaborative” meetings are actually counterproductive to real teamwork.

True collaboration happens when colleagues have the time to develop ideas independently, then come together to improve on each other’s work.

Collaboration isn’t sitting in a room brainstorming from scratch – it’s capable professionals bringing their best thinking to a focused discussion. The meetings that actually work are the ones where people come with solutions, not the ones where they come to figure things out together.

So what does effective meeting culture actually look like?

Introduce friction back into the meeting process.

The most successful organisations I work with have strict rules: no meeting without a clear purpose, no recurring meetings without regular evaluation, and no meetings longer than ninety minutes without a extraordinary reason.

Some organisations assign a dollar cost to meetings based on the hourly rates of attendees. When you see that your “quick sync” is costing $800 per hour, you start to think differently about whether it’s necessary. The quality improvements are usually immediate.

Second, distinguish between updates and actual creative work.

Most meeting content should be written communication.

The meetings that justify their time are the ones focused on problems that require real-time interaction. Everything else – project updates – should happen through documented processes.

I worked with a professional services company that replaced their weekly progress reviews with a simple online dashboard. Meeting time dropped by half, and project communication actually improved. Everyone can see what’s happening without sitting through meeting discussions.

Stop treating inclusion as the highest virtue.

The best managers I know are strategic about who they invite in different types of decisions.

Stakeholder engagement is important for strategic changes, but not every choice requires universal agreement. Most routine choices should be made by the individuals closest to the work. They understand that broader input isn’t always useful perspectives.

The measurement that transformed my thinking about meetings:

Track the ratio of talking time to actual work on your major projects.

I’ve worked with teams where people were working weekends to complete tasks because their normal working hours were consumed by discussions.

Sometimes the ratio is even worse. High-performing companies flip this ratio. They spend minimal time in meetings and maximum time on execution. The talking serves the doing, not the other way around.

That’s not effectiveness – it’s organisational failure.

Why are people so attached to meetings?

For many leaders, meetings provide a sense of control that actual work doesn’t offer. In a meeting, you can direct the conversation, show your value, and feel important to team success.

Actually doing work is often individual, risky, and doesn’t provide the same visible feedback as leading a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your productivity, even if they don’t generate value.

Don’t get me wrong – some meetings are absolutely necessary.

The teams that do meetings well treat them like expensive resources.

Everything else is just organisational performance that consumes the time and energy that could be used on meaningful work. They’re strategic about when to use them, rigorous about how to run them, and honest about whether they’re effective.

What I wish every manager understood about meetings:

Good meetings solve problems permanently rather than creating ongoing debate cycles.

Poor meetings generate more meetings.

Design your meeting culture to support work, not compete with it.

The future of business productivity depends on it.

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