The feeling of being over-scheduled is a symptom of running ineffective meetings with no clear purpose. These bad meetings create new problems that then spawn more meetings to fix them, creating a vicious cycle of wasted time. The solution is better meetings, not fewer.

Scheduled, recurring meetings can lead to teams inventing topics to discuss simply because the time is blocked. This creates busywork that isn't impactful. It's better to meet when necessary rather than defaulting to a fixed cadence without a clear, persistent need.

Banning meetings doesn't solve the underlying need for alignment. Instead, it pushes chaotic, unstructured conversations into less effective asynchronous channels like Slack or Google Docs. This loses the benefit of real-time discussion without fixing the root cause of bad meetings.

Managers work in small time blocks, so a meeting is just one of many. Makers require large, uninterrupted chunks. A single meeting breaks a large block into two unusable smaller ones, effectively destroying an entire half-day's worth of productive output for the maker.

Before attending a meeting, ask two questions: 1) "What specific decision or alignment will this create?" and 2) "What happens if we don't have this meeting?" If you can't provide clear, impactful answers, the meeting is a waste of time and should be canceled or handled asynchronously.

High-performing remote teams exhibit "bursty" collaboration—short, intense periods of interaction followed by deep work. To enable this, teams should cancel recurring meetings and instead establish shared "collaboration hours" where everyone is available for ad-hoc problem-solving and spontaneous discussion.

The first step to better meetings is asking "should we have this meeting at all?" By eliminating purely informational meetings, you prevent the formation of norms like disengagement and silence. This makes it more likely that when a collaborative meeting is necessary, team members will actively participate.

Calendly's research reveals a paradox: while the common sentiment is anti-meeting, a vast majority (81%) of professionals believe more productive meetings would help them at work. This suggests the problem isn't the quantity of meetings, but their quality and purpose. People crave effective, decision-oriented collaboration.

When a maker's performance drops, managers often increase check-in meetings to 'help'. These interruptions further fragment the maker's time, causing performance to drop even more. This creates a productivity death spiral where the manager's intended solution becomes the root cause of the problem.