30-Minute Meetings Are a Scam, Revisited

• May 24, 2026
• essays  
• advice  
• work  
• meetings  
• corporate life  
• jobs  

Last year, I wrote a blog post about why I think half-hour meetings suck. You should read it first before reading this one – it’s short. Also, I still stand by a lot of it.

The tl;dr is that most things that require meetings actually take 15 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour, and that almost everything else shouldn’t be a meeting in the first place.

I am now going to elaborate and add a whole bunch of caveats.

This post comes in seven parts:

1. Why (many) half-hour meetings are bad
2. Half-hour meetings are good for fewer things than I thought
3. Exceptions to the “30-minute meetings are a scam” rule
4. The appropriate length of time for 1 on 1 meetings with your manager
5. Why (half-hour) meetings proliferate
6. Reducing the number of ineffective meetings in your schedule
7. Ineffective meetings are an expensive waste of time

Alright, let’s get into it.

Why (many) half-hour meetings are bad

The problem with half-hour meetings is that humans are not robots and communication is hard. A lot of the half-hour meetings I’ve been invited to have been for the purpose of sharing information, discussing something (or what to do about it), or trying to come to a decision. Inevitably, the following will happen:

• 3-5 (or more) minutes will be lost to people showing up late / small talk.
• Someone will spend time explaining the purpose of the meeting.
• The actual purpose of the meeting will be renegotiated / explained because not everyone will be on the same page (and also people may be figuring out how to communicate with each other).
• There will be lots of questions and requests for information or clarification.
• There will inevitably be some tangents, because that’s what happens when things are unclear.
• By the time everyone has agreed on what to talk about and the actual discussion is beginning to be underway, there will be 5 minutes left and someone will point out that they have another meeting.
• The discussion will try to continue in a streamlined way for the next five minutes, but then everyone will realize that a follow-up meeting needs to be booked, and of course no one wants an even longer follow-up meeting, because half an hour has already been spent discussing the topic (in theory, anyway).

So what happens when everyone has agreed to a follow-up meeting?

• Someone will have to waste time scheduling another meeting, which can be a nightmare if it involves other people.
• Another 3-5 (or more) minutes will be lost to people showing up late / small talk.
• Someone will inevitably have to explain the purpose of the meeting again.
• Time will be spent recapping what was discussed at the previous meeting, since time will have passed and context will have been lost.
• Also, time will be spent discussing what happened since the last meeting.

And there goes another 10-15 minutes. In my opinion, a lot of this overhead can be avoided by making the initial meeting 45 minutes in the first place.

I will concede that some people are really good at running productive half hour meetings, because they start on time (or close to it), have an agenda and stick to it, and expect everyone to be concise. They also tend to be the types of people who make sure everyone has action items at the end of the meeting and knows what they are doing. It takes a very specific kind of organizational culture to pull this off, though. More on this later.

On the flip side, the other type of bad half-hour meeting are the meetings that are scheduled for half an hour but actually take 15 minutes (or less). On the surface, they don’t seem to waste time, since the meeting can just end early. Right?

Actually, there is still a cost to this, namely:

• People will elaborate more than they should if the meeting is half an hour long rather than 15 minutes, so instead of meeting for 10 minutes you might end up meeting for 20 minutes.
• If there is extra time left in a meeting, someone will often try to use it by bringing up another discussion topic while everyone is still in the room/call. This tends to make the overall length of the meeting longer than half an hour, which is already problematic. But even more problematically, sometimes the secondary topic does not need to be discussed in a meeting, so time is being wasted.
• Having half hour meetings that end early tends to result in weird 15 minute gaps before the next meeting that can’t actually be used for anything productive. This, in my opinion, is by far the worst consequence of defaulting to booking half-hour meetings for everything.

Half-hour meetings are good for fewer things than I thought

In my last post on this topic, I claimed that half hour meetings are actually good for four things:

• One on one meetings with your manager.
• Stand-ups on large teams.
• Awkward social events.
• Coffee chats with new people.

As of right now, I no longer agree with most of these. First of all, I no longer believe that people should default to booking half-hour 1 on 1 meetings with their managers. There is an entire section of this post that discusses why, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Secondly, if your “standup meeting” is more than 15 minutes long, then either your team is way too big or the meeting is no longer functioning as a standup (perhaps because people are hijacking it to have actual discussions about the work). If the meeting is no longer functioning as a standup, then there are two possible ways to improve the situation:

1. Continue to hold the standup, but ban all longer form and/or tangential discussions to keep the length of the meeting down to 15 minutes.
2. Realize that the standup format is not working for the team and book a longer team meeting instead, at which point someone will have to decide whether 45 minutes or 1 hour is a more suitable length of time.

Notice how “lengthen the standup to half an hour” is not one of my proposed options. If the choice is between keeping the meeting as is and tripling or even quadrupling the length of the meeting, then people will think pretty hard about whether they actually need the additional meeting time or if they can just hold more disciplined meetings instead.

I also no longer think that half an hour is an appropriate length of time for awkward social events. I think social events, more than any other type of event, benefit from being 45 minutes long at minimum. The correct solution to the problem of awkward social events is organizing events that are significantly less awkward.

I’ve also somewhat revised my opinion on the appropriate length of time for coffee chats. I still think half an hour can be an appropriate length of time for a coffee chat that you think might be awkward, or for a coffee chat with a busy person who has extremely limited time, but the problem is that if it ends up not being awkward, you’ll almost certainly want more time. My new rule for booking coffee chats is that I book half an hour if it’s someone I think I can easily get a hold of again if I need to (examples might be catching up with an acquaintance I already know socially, or if I was meeting a colleague from a different part of an organization I was working for), or if I think the person I’m meeting is so busy that they won’t agree to more than half an hour. I now book 45 minute chats in all other cases and so far no one has complained about it.¹

Exceptions to the “30-minute meetings are a scam” rule

Here is when I think half hour meetings actually work:

• Coffee chats, with some caveats; see the previous section.
• When the goal of the meeting is known and agreed upon in advance, everyone has done their homework, and there is a clear agenda. These meetings could take multiple forms: for example, they could be status updates, requirements gathering, interviews, and so on. However, the key point here is that it’s a structured meeting and everyone has agreed (either implicitly or explicitly) not to deviate from the structure. This is much, much easier said than done.
• For some people (but not everyone), 1 on 1 meetings with their manager, with some caveats; see the following section.

The appropriate length of time for 1 on 1 meetings with your manager

In my last post, I gave some advice about booking 1 on 1’s that I now think is wrong. The appropriate length of time for 1 on 1’s depends on a bunch of factors, including:

• how senior you are
• how senior your manager is
• the kind of job you have
• the amount of experience you have
• your manager’s leadership style
• how closely you work with your manager

My rough heuristic for this is that the more senior you are, the more total time you should be spending with your manager. The more new to your role you are, the more structured that time should be. The more closely you work with your manager, the more frequent that time should be. I also think the minimum length for a 1 on 1 meeting should be half an hour.

Here are some concrete examples (non-exhaustive):

• An intern who administratively reports to their manager but doesn’t actually work with them may only need to check in for half an hour once a month.
• A new employee who is expected to work very closely with their manager may need an hour of 1 on 1 time every week.
• A very senior employee who works somewhat closely with their manager might have a biweekly 45 minute 1 on 1 with their manager, and check in informally for other things.
• A senior employee who works very closely with their manager may be informally communicating with them so frequently that formal meetings are really only needed every 2 months or so.

A manager who won’t even find half an hour a month for a direct report, no matter how junior, is not doing their job.

Why (half-hour) meetings proliferate

In my opinion, there are four main categories of reasons for the proliferation of half-hour meetings (or really, of meetings in general):

1. Force of habit and scope creep
2. Laziness (people don’t want to read or write things)
3. Opacity and fuzziness in the organization
4. Distance between colleagues (whether physical or metaphorical)

Let’s unpack these a little bit more.

1. Force of habit and scope creep.

Unfortunately, some organizations seem to have cultures where meetings are booked for everything. Meetings end up being half an hour, because at that length of time it feels more natural to be able to have back to back meetings and because you can fit in more meetings that way. Things that shouldn’t require meetings start to have meetings scheduled for them, because ironically, booking meetings becomes the default way to protect time to get things done. Because people have so many meetings, some people start to run their days out of their calendar, so things basically don’t exist on their radar unless there is a meeting for it.

The problem is that in an organization like this, when scope creep starts to happen (which it always does, in any organization), the default response is not to take some time to reevaluate what is happening and cut down on the scope creep, but rather to book more meetings and potentially to involve more people. The default response to lack of clarity also becomes booking more meetings. At this point, however, holding a meeting is rarely a productive use of anyone’s time, because actual thinking does not tend to occur during meetings.² This kind of organization also tends to encourage lazy behaviours like people refusing to read emails or write them, probably because they spend so much time in meetings that they don’t feel that they have the energy to read anything.

2. Laziness (people don’t want to read or write things)

I recently posted a list of lessons I’ve learned over the last few years, and one of them was the following:

“This meeting could have been an email” is a lie, because nobody reads emails.

It’s nice to tell people that they should try sending emails instead of booking meetings, but people who have learned over time that their emails either go unread or are chronically poorly understood due to the recipient only skimming them will probably start to subsequently book meetings instead.

But you know what’s worse? People who book meetings because they can’t be bothered to read things themselves.³

Over the last few years, I have learned that a lot of people:

• will not read emails
• will not read documentation pages even when specifically pointed to the right page
• will not read reports, or even the one page summary of the reports
• will not read a sequence of more than 4 or 5 instant messages

These people often end up booking meetings to find out information they already had access to, which many people (experts, especially) tend to find infuriating. Now, you might argue that they are doing so because they don’t have the expertise to understand the thing they’re reading. My argument is that the correct thing to do is to read the document beforehand so that you can ask specific questions during the meeting; otherwise, you’re relying on people to provide lots of background context and divine what exactly it is that you’re trying to figure out, which is time consuming and wastes time.

The other problem is that asking questions via email requires you to write emails, and a lot of people don’t like doing this. In fact, not only do many people dislike writing emails, many people write borderline incomprehensible emails that make it very difficult to communicate with them in a textual fashion. So these people also end up having to book meetings to figure out how to make themselves understood (either that, or people give up on emailing them and end up booking a meeting) in order to get anything done.

As someone who does a lot of technical communication, I find people refusing to read things especially infuriating. Meetings are by far one of the worst ways to share technical information, and the worst type of meeting is when people attempt to share technical proposals and then make decisions about them within the same meeting. There is way too much potential for decisions to be made based on misunderstandings (since a lot of people don’t pay attention very well in meetings, either). The correct way to have a technical discussion is to only hold a meeting once everyone has read the background material on their own time.

Having an organizational culture where people actually read and write things makes for fewer meetings and enables the meetings that do exist to be shorter. Unfortunately, it also requires having an organizational culture where we expect people to be literate, which seems to become a more difficult ask every day.⁴

3. Opacity and fuzziness in the organization

Having an organizational culture where there are few meetings and the meetings that do exist are short requires a culture of clarity and focus where it is easy to get people on the same page. For people to be productive with fewer meetings, they need to know what they’re working on, why, and how to do it. To be able to stick to an agenda for your meeting, you need to be able to come up with a list of agenda items in the first place. To only include the right people in your meetings, you need to already know who the right people are. To have focused meetings, you need to have focused goals.

In some organizations, this is much easier said than done. Government organizations, for example, tend to be byzantine places where scope is unclear, jurisdiction is unclear, goals can be unclear, information is often poorly documented or even completely undocumented, there is all sorts of red tape in the way that people are trying to tiptoe around, and coming up with a process to do something requires figuring out the correct five people who have the right information about what you need stored somewhere in their heads. Once you find those people, you actually need to pull the information out of their heads somehow, get it to the right people, get the right approvals, and then maybe you can actually do your original task, assuming the end goal didn’t change while you were in the middle of all that nonsense. And so obviously meetings will proliferate, because there is no other way to acquire enough information or consensus to actually do anything.

4. Distance between colleagues (whether physical or metaphorical)

Sometimes people book meetings for things because they don’t feel comfortable enough with their colleagues to have an ad-hoc discussion yet.⁵ I think this is the easiest problem to solve though, because unless the organizational culture is hostile, the sense of distance usually dissipates over time.

Reducing the number of ineffective meetings in your schedule

This advice is mostly for people who are stuck in organizations with insane half-hour meeting cultures that they are for the most part powerless to change.⁶ That being said, I think it also makes a good list of reminders for everyone else.

• As much as possible, book meetings with people only when necessary. If a problem can be solved asynchronously (either via messaging or email), try that route first.

• If you share physical office space with your colleagues, take advantage of the ability to stop by their desks when they don’t look too busy. This especially works well with people who won’t read things.

• Combating laziness starts with you. If you hate being dragged into meetings by or with people who won’t read things, don’t be a person who doesn’t read things. If you hate being in meetings with people who haven’t done any sort of basic preparation, don’t be that person who doesn’t prepare for meetings.

• Prefer longer and more infrequent meetings over shorter and more frequent meetings.

• Short meetings (15 minutes) are meant for updates or for resolving quick problems. Make sure everyone knows why they’re there, get to the point, and resist the urge to engage in small talk or tangential discussions.

• If your organizational culture is such that booking 15-minute or 45-minute meetings isn’t a big deal, do so as much as possible instead of booking half an hour.

• If you’re not sure what the purpose or outcome of a meeting is going to be, then either it’s an exploratory type of meeting (in which case you’ll actually want 45 minutes or an hour) or you need to do some extra work to clarify what you want out of the meeting before booking the meeting. Sometimes, doing said extra work will reveal that you do not actually need a meeting.

• If you think you’ll need an hour-long meeting for something, it helps to explain why you think it’ll take that long to everyone involved and give them a reasonable amount of advance notice before booking the meeting. Otherwise, they might ask you to book half an hour instead. If that happens, try to negotiate the meeting length to 45 minutes.

• If you for whatever reason booked a 30-minute meeting for something that you suspect might take longer or shorter than half an hour, block out the half hour immediately following the meeting in your calendar as well if you can. If it ends up being a short meeting, you now have 40-45 minutes of focus time blocked out in your calendar instead of the 10-15 minutes of ineffective free time you would have had if you had back-to-back meetings. If it turns out to be a longer meeting, then at the very least you have made sure you have free time to continue the discussion, so if you get lucky and the other parties involved do as well, you might avoid having to book a follow-up meeting. If you get unlucky, then at least you have time to book a follow-up meeting and then catch up on a few other things.

Ineffective meetings are an expensive waste of time

On a closing note, I’ll repeat one of the anecdotes I included in my last post about this topic:

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.

For concreteness, let’s illustrate this with a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say a manager has 5 employees on their team and they hold five half-hour-long meetings to discuss whether to use Jira, Trello, or Excel spreadsheets to track their work. The manager is included in 2 of these meetings, a project manager from a different team is included in two of these meetings, and the team consists of 3 junior and 2 senior data analysts.

Let’s assume the following salary breakdown:

• Manager: $150,000 annually ($72.11/hr)
• Project Manager: $130,000 annually ($62.50/hr)
• Junior Data Analyst: $65,000 annually ($31.25/hr)
• Senior Data Analyst: $100,000 annually ($48.08/hr)

Then the cost of trying to figure out what task tracking tool to use was (2 * $72.11) + (2 * $65.50) + (5 * 3 * $31.25) + (5 * 2 * $48.08) = $1221.77.

Isn’t that insane? ⁷