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The ROI of Time Management Courses for Businesses

 

The $50 Billion Meeting Problem Nobody Wants to Fix

 

 

The meeting was supposed to start at 2 PM.

 

 

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

 

 

I calculated recently that my clients are collectively spending over $1.5 million per year on meetings that produce no tangible outcomes.

 

 

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 professionals 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.

 

 

The uncomfortable truth about meeting culture? the majority of them are just performance anxiety disguised as collaboration.

 

 

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

 

 

The dirty secret of meeting culture is that most meetings exist to make executives feel like they're in control, not to actually solve problems or make progress.

 

 

This isn't collaboration - it's group therapy for managers who can't trust their teams outside of a formal setting. It's management theatre, performed for an audience of captive colleagues.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The first meeting ran for nearly three hours. The agenda covered eight different projects, most of which only involved a handful of 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.

 

 

The rise of remote work has made the meeting problem exponentially worse.

 

 

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

 

 

I've seen teams where it's literally impossible to find a three-hour block of uninterrupted time in anyone's calendar.

 

 

The result? Meeting proliferation. What used to be a brief discussion is now a scheduled session with agendas. Every day is fragmented into brief chunks between various meetings.

 

 

Here's the part that really gets me fired up: the assumption that more collaboration automatically leads to better results.

 

 

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a project is leave people alone to actually work on it.

 

 

There's a reason why the most creative companies - think Netflix in their early days - were famous for small teams.

 

 

Every concept needed to be validated in multiple meetings before it could move forward. The result was safe work that had been committee-approved into blandness. The best ideas died in the endless review processes.

 

 

Genius doesn't happen in conference rooms full of stakeholders.

 

 

The meeting industrial complex has its own vocabulary designed to make everything sound important.

 

 

"I think we need a deeper dive" - 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}.}}

 

 

"We should touch base next week" - 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 destructive to real teamwork.

 

 

Real innovation happens in focused spaces where experts can think deeply without the pressure of speaking up for an audience.

 

 

Collaboration isn't sitting in a room discussing from scratch - it's intelligent people bringing their best thinking to a time-limited 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.

 

 

What are the alternatives to meeting madness?

 

 

First, make meetings costly to schedule.

 

 

I love the teams that have instituted "meeting-free afternoons" where scheduling are simply not allowed.

 

 

Some teams 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 dramatic.

 

 

Separate communication from collaboration.

 

 

The majority of meeting time is wasted on information that could be shared more effectively through email.

 

 

The meetings that justify their time are the ones focused on creative challenges that require immediate feedback. Everything else - information sharing - should happen through documented processes.

 

 

I worked with a consulting firm that replaced their weekly team updates with a simple weekly report. Meeting time dropped by 60%, and project communication actually improved. Everyone can see what's happening without sitting through presentations.

 

 

Third, normalise the fact that not everyone needs to be included in every decision.

 

 

The best leaders I know are careful about who they invite in different types of decisions.

 

 

Stakeholder engagement is important for organisational issues, but not every choice requires group consensus. Most operational decisions should be made by the individuals closest to the work. They understand that more perspectives isn't always better input.

 

 

Here's the metric that changed everything for me:

 

 

Calculate how much time you spend meeting about projects versus implementing solutions.

 

 

For most teams, the ratio is terrifying. They're spending two hours discussing every one hour of execution.

 

 

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

 

 

That's not productivity - it's dysfunction.

 

 

The psychology of meeting addiction is fascinating.

 

 

There's also a safety in meetings. If you're in meetings all day, you can't be held accountable for not delivering work.

 

 

Actually doing work is often independent, challenging, and doesn't provide the same visible feedback as leading a meeting. The meetings become evidence of your commitment, even if they don't produce value.

 

 

Look, I'm not suggesting we eliminate all meetings.

 

 

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

 

 

Everything else is just organisational ritual that destroys the time and energy that could be used on meaningful work. They're strategic about when to use them, disciplined about how to run them, and ruthless about whether they're valuable.

 

 

What I wish every executive understood about meetings:

 

 

The best meetings are the ones that eliminate the need for future meetings.

 

 

Ineffective meetings multiply like bacteria.

 

 

Choose accordingly.

 

 

The future of Australian effectiveness depends on it.

 

 

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