There’s a progression that happens as you move up in leadership. Individual contributors spend most of their day doing the work. Managers split time between meetings and execution. Directors attend meetings about what the managers are doing. VPs attend meetings about what the directors are attending. And somewhere along the way, meetings stop being interruptions to work and become the work itself.

The pandemic was supposed to change this. Instead, it made things worse. According to Fellow’s 2024 State of Meetings report, time spent in meetings has tripled since before the pandemic. Managers now spend roughly 25% of their week in meetings. Senior leaders at larger companies spend 40% or more. The shift to remote work didn’t reduce meetings; it multiplied them. If I was to hazard a guess, I’d say that that boils down to trust–meetings equate to visibility, and visibility equates to validation. I wrote about this a earlier last year and it still holds true today.

The pattern intensifies as you climb. Middle management hovers around 35% meeting time. By the C-suite, meetings consume nearly three-quarters of available hours. A 2018 Harvard Business School study tracking 27 CEOs found they averaged 37 meetings per week, with only 28% of their time unscheduled. Most of that alone time came in fragmented blocks of an hour or less.

This isn’t necessarily dysfunction. At senior levels, coordination is the job. But the org chart misses something important: someone still has to do the thinking.

Where the Thinking Went

Thoughtful strategy doesn’t write itself in the fifteen minutes between calls. Complex decisions don’t resolve themselves during the walk from one conference room to another. The preparation and reflection that make meetings valuable happens somewhere. For most leaders, that somewhere is evenings and weekends.

The average professional spends over an hour preparing for each meeting. Multiply that by 37 weekly meetings and the math breaks immediately. Either preparation gets sacrificed, or it happens on personal time. Usually both. We show up underprepared to some meetings because we spent our evenings preparing for others.

I’ve written before about thoughtwork time and chronotype alignment. This is the third leg of that problem: not whether thinking time matters or when we’re most productive, but where the actual thinking happens when the calendar leaves no room for it.

The Flattening of Meeting Types

Meetings used to come in varieties.

• Workshopping sessions where teams built things together.
• Brainstorming sessions where bad ideas were welcome because they led to good ones.
• Pre-mortems where we imagined failure before it happened.
• “Share-a-passion” sessions where the goal was open knowledge sharing.
• “Freedom of thought” sessions where the goal was exploration, not decision.

These archetypes seem to have collapsed into a single format: the presentation meeting. Someone has slides. They present. Questions follow. Decisions get made or deferred. Everyone moves to the next calendar block.

The collaborative meeting types haven’t disappeared entirely. They’ve just become rare enough that scheduling one feels like a special event requiring justification. The default is passive information transfer, not idea generation.

Part of this might be a leadership progression problem. Individual contributors still brainstorm with their peers. First-line managers still workshop with their teams. But as you rise, the pressure shifts toward “getting decisions made” and “staying informed.” Collaboration starts feeling like a luxury. Senior leaders are presumed too busy for the messy, time-consuming work of actually thinking together. I recognize that this perception is not universal, but I’ve seen it enough to recognize it as a pattern.

Informed vs. Consulted

I’m sure most are familiar with a RACI framework: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. The last two matter here.

Being Consulted means your input shapes the outcome. You’re brought in because your thinking adds value. The meeting exists to gather your perspective before decisions finalize.

Being Informed means you receive information. You attend so you know what happened. Your presence is about awareness, not contribution.

Somewhere along the way, many meetings shifted from Consulted to Informed. Our calendars fill with status updates and briefings. Leaders attend because they need to know things, not because their thinking is needed. The meeting accomplishes its goal whether or not anyone contributes beyond “any questions?”

This creates a visibility problem. Leaders who attend the most meetings appear the most engaged. Their calendars demonstrate commitment. But attendance isn’t contribution. Knowing what’s happening isn’t the same as thinking about what should be happening.

The cost compounds when meetings span multiple levels. An IC, their manager, the director, and the VP all sit in the same room for an hour. The IC needs tactical details. The VP needs strategic context. Everyone in between is either bored by information they already have or overwhelmed by details they shouldn’t need. One meeting, four different attention levels, four hours of combined salary spent on content that could have been an email to one person and a summary to the others.

The Overstimulation Trap

As meetings shift toward Informed, organizations start expecting leaders to know everything about everything.

Senior leaders get pulled into operational details that their direct reports should own. Instead of focusing on strategy and direction, they’re expected to recall specific story points values and individual contributor timelines. Scrum ceremonies that exist for team coordination somehow require VP attendance in many organizations.

This happens because organizations often reward visible engagement over effective leadership. The leader who can answer any question about any corner of their organization gets praised for being “hands-on” and “connected.” The leader who trusts their teams and focuses on the bigger picture gets asked why they don’t know the details.

Understanding this dynamic matters because it explains why calendar bloat feels so hard to fight. Declining meetings can look like disengagement. Trusting your teams can look like being out of touch. The incentive structure pulls toward more meetings, not fewer. I tend to sit in the second camp, but use the situations to help promote and give visibility to the team itself. Do I know all the WIP answers? No, but I have a fantastic team who does and I’m happy to give them the floor.

The Real Cost

The meeting tax doesn’t show up on any budget. It’s paid in evenings spent catching up on the thinking that couldn’t happen during the day. It’s paid in weekends spent preparing for Monday’s presentations. It’s paid in the strategic clarity that never develops because reflection time doesn’t exist.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that workers face interruptions every two minutes during core hours. By 10pm, 29% of workers are still in their inboxes catching up. The workday hasn’t ended; it’s just changed locations.

For leaders with families, this creates an impossible situation. The thinking time that makes you effective at work competes directly with the presence that makes you effective at home.

The first step is simply naming this trade-off honestly. The thinking has to happen somewhere. If your calendar doesn’t have room for it, you’re implicitly choosing to do it on personal time. That might be the right choice for a season, but it should be a conscious one, not something that happens by default because no one talked about where the thinking goes.

What Would Change Look Like?

Meeting culture is sticky and individual resistance rarely survives organizational inertia. Here’s a few things that have helped me.

Distinguish meeting types explicitly. Not every gathering needs to be a presentation. Label brainstorming sessions as brainstorming sessions. Schedule workshops as workshops. When the meeting type is explicit, expectations align better with outcomes.

Protect Consulted from Informed. Before adding a senior leader to a meeting, ask whether their thinking is needed or whether they just need to know what happened afterward. The second can often be a five-minute readout or a written summary. I’ve had good results with memos to senior leaders for both informing and calls to action. Many get a quick signoff without a meeting, and if more discussion is needed, it happens in 1:1s where the conversation is actually productive.

Make preparation time visible. If a meeting requires an hour of preparation, that hour should appear somewhere. Either build it into the meeting block or accept that it will happen on personal time. Tools like Microsoft Outlook’s Focus Time feature can help by scheduling protected blocks a week or two ahead. The harder part is ensuring your teams and peers actually respect those blocks instead of treating them as optional. I truly miss the culture of “No Meeting Friday” that was so prevalent during COVID.

Question the attendance list. The impulse to invite senior leaders for “visibility” adds meetings without adding value. If someone’s presence is truly optional, make it optional. Most will choose their time over their attendance.

None of this is easy. Organizations default toward more meetings, not fewer, but recognizing the tax is the first step toward deciding whether it’s worth paying.

Making the Trade-offs Visible

The meeting tax exists because we’ve conflated visibility with value. Leaders who spend their days in meetings look busy. Leaders who block time for thinking look unavailable. Understanding this dynamic is the first step toward navigating it intentionally.

You probably can’t change your organization’s meeting culture single-handedly. But you can make conscious choices about where you spend your time, how you communicate your availability, and what you’re willing to sacrifice for presence versus contribution.

The calendar doesn’t lie about where the hours go. But it also doesn’t show what those hours cost. Once you see the full picture, you can start deciding which meetings are worth the tax and which ones are just habit.

The work isn’t the meetings. The work is what makes the meetings worth having. Keeping that distinction clear helps you protect the thinking time that makes both possible.