The average Australian worker spends about 6.5 hours per week in meetings. That’s according to a 2024 survey by Atlassian, and if you work in a mid-to-large company, your number is probably higher. The frustrating part isn’t the meetings themselves — it’s how many of them accomplish nothing.

I’ve sat through hundreds of meetings over the years. Some were genuinely useful. Most weren’t. The difference almost always comes down to a few basic habits that are easy to describe and surprisingly hard to stick to.

Before the Meeting

Decide if you actually need a meeting. This sounds obvious, but it’s the step most people skip. If the purpose is to share information that doesn’t require discussion, send an email or a Loom video. If you need a decision from one person, call them. Meetings are for when you need multiple people to discuss something in real time. That’s it.

Write an agenda. A real one. Not “Discuss Q1 plans.” Something like: “Decide whether to proceed with the Melbourne expansion — need yes/no by end of meeting.” When people know exactly what’s being decided, they come prepared. When the agenda is vague, everyone shows up ready to ramble.

Invite fewer people. There’s a strong correlation between meeting size and meeting uselessness. Jeff Bezos had his two-pizza rule. I’d go further — if you can’t explain why each person needs to be there, they probably don’t. Five people who can contribute beats twelve people who are mostly checking their phones.

Set a time limit and make it short. The default meeting length in most calendar apps is 30 or 60 minutes. Change your default to 25 or 50 minutes. This gives people a buffer between back-to-back meetings and forces you to be more focused. Most 60-minute meetings can be 30 minutes if the agenda is tight.

During the Meeting

Start on time. Don’t wait for stragglers. When you wait five minutes for someone who’s late, you’re telling the people who showed up on time that their time matters less. Start at the scheduled time. Latecomers can catch up.

State the goal at the beginning. Literally say: “We’re here to decide X” or “We need to agree on Y by the end of this.” This sounds mechanical, but it gives the conversation a direction. Without it, discussions drift.

Park tangents immediately. When someone raises an interesting but off-topic point, write it down and say “let’s come back to that separately.” Don’t let a meeting about the website redesign turn into a debate about the brand strategy. Those might be related, but they’re different conversations.

Assign a note-taker. If no one writes down what was discussed and decided, the meeting didn’t happen. You’ll have the same conversation again in two weeks. Notes don’t need to be detailed minutes — just decisions made and actions assigned.

End with clear next steps. Every meeting should end with: who is doing what, by when. If you finish a meeting and no one has a specific action item, you probably didn’t need the meeting.

The Meetings You Should Kill

Some meetings exist because they’ve always existed. The weekly status update where everyone reads from a spreadsheet. The monthly all-hands where the same information from the email gets repeated verbally. The brainstorming session that produces sticky notes but never produces results.

Audit your recurring meetings every quarter. For each one, ask: what decision or outcome does this meeting produce? If the answer is “none, it’s just a check-in,” replace it with an async update — a shared document, a Slack thread, a short video.

Standing Meetings That Work

Not all recurring meetings are bad. Daily standups in small teams (genuinely short — 10 minutes max) can work well when they’re focused on blockers, not status reports. The question isn’t “what did you do yesterday?” It’s “what’s stopping you from making progress today?”

Weekly one-on-ones between managers and their direct reports are valuable when they focus on the person, not the project. Career development, feedback, concerns — the stuff that gets crowded out by day-to-day work.

The Cultural Problem

The hardest part of fixing meetings isn’t the tactics. It’s the culture. In many workplaces, being in meetings signals importance. A packed calendar means you’re busy, and busy means valuable. This is backwards thinking, but it’s deeply embedded.

The best teams I’ve seen treat meeting time as expensive. Every meeting has a cost — multiply the hourly rate of everyone in the room by the meeting length, and suddenly a one-hour meeting with eight people feels a lot less casual.

You don’t need a policy document or a company-wide initiative. Just start with your own meetings. Make them shorter. Make them smaller. Make them purposeful. The people who attend will notice. And they’ll probably thank you.