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The “Meet” Sweats

Too Much “Meet” to Digest

Does your meetings calendar look like you’re full on “green button go” in the Brazilian steakhouse? Just like the body can’t handle back-to-back heavy meals, the mind can’t digest endless “meet.” Each stop-and-start tears continuity to shreds. Strategic, creative, and executional work requires long stretches of focus, yet the modern calendar chops the day into fragmented chunks.

The result? Anxiety, decision fatigue, and a creeping sense that while everyone is “busy,” nothing of consequence is actually moving forward.

Yep, the “meet sweats.”

What the Greats Have Said About Meetings

The frustrations with meetings aren’t new. Some of the most respected leaders and thinkers in business history have sounded the alarm:

• Peter Drucker: “Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings, the better.”
• W. Edwards Deming: “Don’t just do your best; instead, eliminate the need to do your best by removing barriers.” (And unnecessary meetings are among the biggest barriers.)
• Jack Welch: “Meetings must be crisp, focused, and packed with substance. They should never become a substitute for action.”
• Lee Iacocca: “You can’t have innovation when you have too many meetings. All you’ll get is more meetings.”
• Patrick Thean (Rhythm Systems): “Too many companies confuse motion with progress. Meetings should create alignment, not motion.”
• Dan Heath (author of Decisive): “We need to stop making easy decisions in hard ways. Many meetings exist just to confirm what everyone already knows.”

Even today’s disruptive leaders carry that torch:

• Elon Musk: “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies.”
• Jeff Bezos: “If two pizzas can’t feed the meeting, it’s too big.”

If the U.S. Cabinet and Joint Chiefs of Staff can make life-or-death decisions in shorter meetings than most startups, small and mid-sized companies hold, those companies must ask themselves: what the heck are we doing?

Have we let meetings become the end and not the means?

Map the Cadence, Expose the Cost

One of the most eye-opening exercises leaders can do is to map the cadence of meetings across the organization.Chart every recurring meeting by day, time, duration, and attendees. Then ask:

• Which meetings directly drive mission-critical results?
• Which are outdated, duplicated, or bloated?
• What is the true cost of gathering 12 people for 90 minutes? (That’s 18 labor hours.) If you have 12 people in a 90 minute meeting that make an average of $100K each, with burden (x 1.25) that meeting cost you $1,080.
• What would happen if this meeting disappeared?

This kind of cost/benefit analysis of people’s time often reveals shocking inefficiency—and creates the urgency to redesign how time is spent.

Another critical thing to eliminate is multichannel duplication. I am not a big fan of MS Teams but people use it to chat, send information in chat (which not everyone looks at), they also text and email their coworkers – so people get the same information multiple times/ways.

Use the phone. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to pick up the phone. A short conversation can avoid all of the multichannel message clutter and what I call the “over the wall” problem – where people just lob things over the wall and hope someone else deals with it.

10 Strategies to Curtail Meetings (and Banish the Meet Sweats)

1. Ban Monday and Friday meetings. Reserve these days for focus and finish.
2. Institute the “two pizza” rule. Keep groups small.
3. Time-box aggressively. Default to 15–30 minutes instead of 60.
4. No agenda, no meeting. Clarity is mandatory.
5. Offer an “opt-out” clause. Attendance should be purposeful, not obligatory.
6. Shift to async updates. Use shared docs, Sharepoint, Google Docs, Slack, or Loom for status reports. Or, just pick up the phone and have a short call.
7. Create meeting-free days. Strive to give people at least two – ideally three – uninterrupted days each week. People can’t get their work done if their days are all chopped up like chopped sirloin. There’s no continuity.
8. Review recurring meetings. Eliminate those that no longer add value.
9. Encourage early exits. If your contribution is complete, leave.
10. Leaders model it. When the CEO treats time as sacred, so does everyone else.

The Bigger Picture

Meetings are not inherently bad. They can be powerful tools for alignment, trust-building, and decision-making. But when overused or poorly designed, they become the enemy of execution.

The best leaders see meetings for what they are: an investment of the scarcest resource any company has—time.

They treat every meeting as if the company were writing a check. The question is simple: is this worth it?

If you want to banish the “Meet Sweats” from your organization, start treating meetings as the rare privilege they should be—not the default setting of every calendar.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that resources are not limitless – and time is perhaps the most precious of resources. The opportunity cost of time is equally precious.

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Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP, is the CEO & Managing Partner of QORVAL Partners, LLC, a Florida-based advisory firm founded in 1996 by Jim Malone (1942-2021), a six-time Fortune 100/500 CEO and advisor to two US Presidents. Qorval is a U.S.-based advisory, exit planning, turnaround, restructuring, business optimization, and interim management firm.

Fioravanti is a proven turnaround CEO with experience in more than 90 situations across 40+ industries. He earned his MBA and MPA from the University of Rhode Island and completed advanced post-master’s research in finance and marketing at Bryant University. He is a Certified Turnaround Professional and active member of the Turnaround Management Association, Private Directors Association, Association for Corporate Growth, Association of Merger & Acquisition Advisors, the American Bankruptcy Institute, and IMCUSA.

Copyright 2025, Qorval Partners LLC and/or Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP. All rights reserved. No reproduction or redistribution without permission.

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