30-Minute Meetings Are a Scam

• August 12, 2025
• thoughts  
• work  
• meetings  
• corporate life  
• jobs  

Really, most meetings should be 15 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour long.¹

In my (admittedly limited) experience, things that require meetings mostly fall into three categories:

• Quick things, which usually take 15 minutes or less
• Calls where you discuss problems in depth, which rarely take under 40 minutes
• Conversations or meetings where you probably actually want an hour

What 30 minute meetings are actually good for:

• Vibe-checking someone you’re meeting for the first time, especially if you think it might be awkward.
• Detailed stand-ups on large teams
• Awkward social events

30 minutes is also the appropriate amount length of time to book 1 on 1 meetings with your boss for, despite the fact that if your boss is busy they will be late, and you will probably only get 15 minutes with them, and if they have time (unlikely), you might get more like 40 minutes with them. Do you see my point?

The problem is that scheduling 15 or 45 minutes feels weird, so no one does it, and people are reticent to schedule hour-long meetings, because it feels like you’re taking up too much of people’s time.

Everything else really falls into the following categories:

• This should be an email (to 1 or more people)
• This should be an instant message (to 1 or more people)
• Stop by this person’s desk when they’re around

Here’s one fun heuristic I learned from one of my colleagues: if you’re ever in a meeting that feels pointless to you and you’re not even sure why you’re there, figure out how much money each person is making for the duration of that meeting. That’s the cost of this meeting. Now, sum up the amount of money being made by everyone who doesn’t need to be there. That’s the amount of money being wasted by this meeting.

Now, here are some anecdotes from my professional life:

• I have a weekly half hour check in scheduled with someone I work with. We almost always go over time and meet for roughly 45 minutes.
• I recently had two coffee chats scheduled with new people I was meeting, each for half an hour. One went for exactly half an hour, because it was awkward. The other one went way over time (an hour), because it wasn’t awkward and we were getting to know each other. An hour turned out to be exactly the right amount of time (it usually is, for that type of conversation, if you get along well).
• If I know someone well and we are meeting for knowledge sharing or mentoring purposes, I will ask them if we can book an hour meeting, because half an hour is never enough time. By the time you get into the actual meat of the discussion, you are out of time, especially if you start the meeting late and have another meeting right after. I would rather meet for an hour once a month than for half an hour weekly. Seriously.
• My (weekly, ish) standups with the people I work with directly are booked for half an hour. They rarely go over 15 minutes.
• My monthly meetings with my team are booked for an hour. They usually last 45 minutes.

Obviously, I am a sample size of one. Your mileage may vary.

On a closing note, I also think there is absolutely no reason for a meeting to last more than two hours. I don’t know if anyone can stay focused on a single topic of discussion for that long, and at the point where you’re going longer, you’re probably wasting a lot of people’s time (and by extension, the organization’s money).