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I Was Wrong About Meetings. Here Is the Post, Corrected.
In January 2023 I published a post about meetings. It had a section on death by PowerPoint, a section on unproductive brainstorming sessions, a checklist about charging your devices, and a list of tips that included "have a clear purpose" and "be respectful". It signed off with a line about the meeting odds being ever in your favour.
I have since read the research, and I would like to correct myself in public, because the advice in that post is the advice everybody gives, and most of it turns out to be somewhere between harmless and backwards.
This is the piece, marked up. What I said then, what the evidence says now, and what I would do instead.
What you will get out of this
Five things I told you in 2023, each set against the research that has been sitting there since the 1960s
The two levers that actually move a meeting, neither of which is inside the meeting
Why the brainstorm produces about half the ideas the same people would produce alone, and why everyone in the room believes the opposite
A test to run on any invitation before you send it or accept it
What the camera and the microphone do to you on a video call, measured rather than guessed
A one-page replacement for the brainstorm that takes eight minutes and no facilitator
Run this on the next invitation before you read on
Correction one: "Death by PowerPoint" was never the problem
What I said. Keep slides short. Make jokes. Have the discussion after the presentation.
What the evidence says. Nobody has found that slide count predicts anything much. What predicts whether a meeting is any good is dull and structural. In a survey of 367 working adults asked about the staff meeting they had attended in the last 48 hours, researchers tested 18 design characteristics. Nine mattered. They included whether there was an agenda, whether it started on time, whether somebody was clearly running it, and how many people were in the room. Slides were not on the list.
A larger pair of studies, 958 people in one and 292 in the other, found the same thing and added the mechanism. An agenda helps because it gets people involved, and involvement is what makes a meeting feel effective. And the number of people in the room worked the other way: every extra attendee lowered how involved anybody felt.
What I would do instead. Stop editing the deck and start editing the invitation list. A meeting of five with a bad deck beats a meeting of twelve with a good one, and the research is fairly clear which of those two changes you should make first.
Correction two: the unproductive brainstorming session is not unproductive by accident
What I said. Set clear expectations, think outside the box, let everyone bring their sparkle, take breaks.
What the evidence says. This is the one I am most embarrassed by, because the finding is nearly seventy years old and it is not subtle. The man who invented brainstorming claimed that the average person produces twice as many ideas in a group as alone. Every experiment that has tested it has found the reverse.
The standard design is simple. Put four people in a room and let them brainstorm. Put four other people in four separate rooms, let them brainstorm alone, then pool their ideas and remove the duplicates. The four separate people win. Not narrowly. In the study I trust most, because it was run inside a company with employees who had been trained in teamwork and were working on a real problem, the groups generated about half as many ideas as the same number of people working alone.
The mechanism is called production blocking. While you wait for your turn to speak, the idea you were holding fades, and while you listen to somebody else's idea, you stop generating your own. Bigger groups are worse, because the wait is longer. Facilitators, flip charts and pauses were all tested; at best they bring the group back up to what the individuals would have managed anyway.
And here is the part that explains why the brainstorm has survived seventy years of evidence against it. In that same company study, the people who brainstormed in a group rated their own performance more highly, and said they believed they would do better in a group than alone. The room feels productive. That feeling is the whole reason the format persists, and it is wrong.
What I would do instead. Never generate ideas in the room. Send the question out, give everybody eight minutes alone with a page, collect the pages, and use the meeting to sort and decide. There is a sheet for this at the end of the post. It removes the facilitator, the flip chart and the sparkle, and it roughly doubles the number of ideas you have to work with.
Correction three: the eventualities checklist was fine, and it was the least important thing on the page
What I said. Test the software, charge the devices, bring spare cables.
What the evidence says. Nothing against it. Do that. But the same body of research that found facility quality matters, lighting, temperature, the room being fit for purpose, found something with a far larger effect, and it is the thing the checklist does not mention: whether the meeting starts on time.
In one experiment, forty-eight groups were randomly assigned to start on time, five minutes late or ten minutes late. Satisfaction fell with lateness, which you would expect. So did the objective output, the number, quality and feasibility of the ideas the groups produced, which you might not. A second experiment videotaped the conversation and found that late-starting groups, even after controlling for how long they had, produced substantially less solution-focused talk, shallower descriptions of the problem, and fewer supportive remarks to one another. Ten minutes of lateness did not cost ten minutes. It changed what people said for the rest of the hour.
What I would do instead. Start on time, with whoever is there, every time, and make it known that this is what happens. It is the single cheapest improvement in the literature and almost nobody does it, because it feels rude to the person who is late. It is ruder to the six who were not.
Correction four: "take breaks" was right for the wrong reason
What I said. Long meetings need breaks so people can stretch and grab water.
What the evidence says. Meetings cost more than the hour on the calendar. Two experience-sampling studies, 245 and 167 knowledge workers pinged through the day, found that the bigger the share of a morning or afternoon spent in meetings, the fewer small breaks people took between tasks, and fewer small breaks meant less energy. Meetings do not only take the time. They crowd out the recovery around the time.
A meta-analysis of 22 studies on microbreaks found they raise vigour and lower fatigue by a small but real amount, and did not reliably improve performance. So the honest reading is: the break inside the meeting helps people feel better, and the missing break between meetings is what was costing them in the first place.
There is a related finding on load that I think is the most important in the whole literature, and it is about who this hurts. In two surveys of over nine hundred full-time employees, meeting time was tied to lower wellbeing most strongly among the people highest in what the researchers called accomplishment striving. The people who most want to get things done are the people the calendar hurts most. If you are reading a post about meetings on purpose, that is probably you.
What I would do instead. Protect the gaps rather than the breaks. Twenty-five and fifty-minute defaults instead of thirty and sixty, and a rule that nobody books the gap.
Correction five: the tips at the end were true and did nothing
What I said. Have a purpose, set an agenda, encourage participation, be respectful, follow up.
What the evidence says. These are the things that reliably appear in survey research as predictors of a meeting being rated as good, so I was not wrong. I was answering the wrong question. Across employees in 41 countries, fewer than half described their typical meetings as an effective use of time, and the two complaints that came up most were being invited to meetings that had nothing to do with them, and organisers skipping the basics. An agenda does not fix the first one. Nothing inside the meeting fixes the first one.
Two more findings and then the uncomfortable claim. A field study of 199 employees found that meeting load helps engagement and creative output up to a point and then reverses, an inverted U, so there is a right number of meetings and it is not zero and it is not what most calendars look like. And a study of 111 five-person groups, half standing and half seated, found the seated meetings ran 34% longer and produced decisions that were no better. Sitting down buys you a third more time and nothing to show for it.
The uncomfortable claim underneath all of this
Every piece of work like this needs one claim in the middle where the evidence contradicts what everybody knows. Here it is.
The two biggest levers on a meeting are whether it exists and whether it starts on time. Neither of them is inside the meeting, which is why a decade of advice about what to do inside the meeting has not made meetings better.
Everything I wrote in 2023 was about the room. The evidence says the room is the last thing to fix. Load, lateness, size and format are the first four, and every one of them is decided before anybody walks in.
What the camera is doing to you
The 2023 post predates the era when half of meetings happen on a screen, so this is an addition rather than a correction, and the research here is newer and rather good.
In a four-week field experiment with 103 employees, camera use was switched on and off by the researchers rather than the participants. Camera on meant more fatigue that day, and the fatigue reduced how much people spoke up and engaged in their meetings. The effect was larger for women and for newer employees, which is to say for the people already doing the most self-presentation work.
A second study, 55 remote employees pinged every hour for a week across 279 video meetings, found that muting the microphone and feeling you belonged to the group both predicted lower fatigue afterwards, and belonging was the most consistent protection.
And a third, which put heart-rate monitors on 44 knowledge workers across 382 real meetings, found that what we call Zoom fatigue is not exhaustion from overload. It is drowsiness from under-stimulation. Passive, not active. The meeting is not wearing you out. It is putting you to sleep, and that reduced cognitive performance afterwards.
What I would do. Camera optional and said so out loud, because the default is doing measurable harm to the people least able to opt out. Microphone off when not speaking, which is not rudeness, it is recovery. And if a video meeting could be a document, it is drowsiness with a calendar entry.
Download: The Idea Sheet
One page, and it replaces the brainstorm.
The research is unambiguous that the same people produce more and better ideas alone than together, and that pooling the results afterwards captures nearly all of the benefit of the group with none of the blocking. The sheet is the alone part, made easy enough that people actually do it.
What is inside | Why it is there |
The question, written once, in one line | Because a vague question produces vague ideas, and most brainstorms start with "so, thoughts?" |
Eight minutes, twelve numbered lines | Because a limit produces more than an open page, and twelve is more than most groups manage in an hour |
A "worst idea" line | Because it lowers the bar for the next line, and the worst idea is often the one that unlocks the rest |
Two lines for building on somebody else's, filled in after pooling | Because exposure to other ideas does help, once it stops blocking your own |
Free, no email wall. Send it with the question the day before. Use the meeting to sort, not to generate.
Frequently asked questions
So should we stop having meetings?
No. The load research is an inverted U, not a slope. Meetings help engagement and output up to a point. The point is lower than most calendars sit, and the fix is to remove the ones that have nothing to do with the people in them, which the 41-country survey found was the most common complaint.
Does the agenda matter or not?
It matters, and the mechanism is involvement. An agenda gets people engaged, and engaged people rate meetings as effective. It does not fix load, lateness or size, which is why a well-run meeting that should not exist is still a cost.
What about stand-up meetings? Everyone hates them.
People do like them slightly less. In the experiment, seated groups were more satisfied. They also took a third longer to reach decisions that were no better. Whether a third of the time is worth a small drop in satisfaction is a judgement, but it is at least an informed one.
I am not senior enough to cancel meetings or change the invite list.
You can still start on time, which needs no authority. You can still send the idea sheet instead of scheduling a brainstorm. And you can still decline, with one line, a meeting that has nothing to do with you, which the evidence says is the most common kind. Most people never test whether that is allowed.
Is the brainstorming finding really that strong?
It is one of the most replicated findings in social psychology, first published in 1958, meta-analysed in 1991, and confirmed inside a real company in 1995 with trained teams on a real problem. The size of the loss varies. The direction has never reversed in a face-to-face group.
Does any of this apply to one-to-ones?
The lateness and load findings do. The brainstorming and size findings are about groups, and a one-to-one is where a lot of the thinking that groups cannot do should happen.
Where to start
Pick the meeting you run most often. Do three things to it this week, none of which happen inside the room: start it on time whoever is present, remove two people from the invitation who do not need to be there, and cut it from sixty minutes to fifty. Change nothing about the slides.
Then, the next time somebody proposes a brainstorm, send the sheet instead.
The judgement about which meetings to hold, which to shorten and which to decline is one of the things the Connected Leader Assessment measures under Judgement and Decision-Making. It is free, it takes about twelve minutes, and it will tell you whether you are deciding your calendar or your calendar is deciding you.
And if you want the wider territory, how to run the room, hold the line on time, and say no to the invitation without the apology, that is what our Skill Sprints are for. One topic, built properly, an hour or two, and you come out having made something rather than having been talked at.
Meg ✌️
Free tools
The invite test, the interactive tool in this post, free
The Idea Sheet, the download in this post, free
The Connected Leader Assessment, twelve minutes, free, with a read on Judgement and Decision-Making, the dimension this post sits in
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on Meetings?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence the piece is built on. These are the papers that shaped my thinking on why meetings cost what they cost and what actually changes them, and they are well worth your time.
Every DOI below has been checked. Where a popular claim did not survive that check, I have said so in the piece rather than quietly leaving it out.
📃 Luong and Rogelberg (2005) A week of daily diaries. More meetings in a day meant more fatigue and more subjective workload that day. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2699.9.1.58
📃 Rogelberg, Leach, Warr and Burnfield (2006) "Not Another Meeting!" Two surveys, 980 employees. Meeting load hurts wellbeing most among the people who most want to get things done. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.1.83
📃 Rogelberg, Allen, Shanock, Scott and Shuffler (2010) Satisfaction with meetings is a distinct part of job satisfaction, and matters more the more meetings you have. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.20339
📃 Geimer, Leach, DeSimone, Rogelberg and Warr (2015) Employees in 41 countries. Fewer than half call their meetings an effective use of time; irrelevant invitations are the top complaint. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.02.015
📃 Romney, Allen and Heydarifard (2023) The meeting load paradox. Engagement and creative output rise with meeting load and then fall: an inverted U. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2023.10.002
📃 Zhang, Spreitzer and Qiu (2023) Two experience-sampling studies. Time in meetings crowds out microbreaks, and fewer microbreaks means less energy. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001091
📃 Albulescu and colleagues (2022) Microbreaks meta-analysis, 22 samples. Small real gains in vigour and fatigue; no reliable gain in performance. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272460
📃 Diehl and Stroebe (1987) The four experiments that showed production blocking is why brainstorming groups produce fewer ideas than the same people alone. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.53.3.497
📃 Mullen, Johnson and Salas (1991) The meta-analysis. The brainstorming loss is consistent and grows with group size. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15324834basp1201_1
📃 Bouchard and Hare (1970) Five-, seven- and nine-person groups. The gap between groups and individuals widens as the group grows. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0028621
📃 Paulus, Larey and Ortega (1995) Inside a company, with trained teams and a real problem: groups produced about half as many ideas, and rated themselves higher. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.1995.9646143
📃 Stroebe and Diehl (1994) The review that named the illusion of group effectivity. https://doi.org/10.1080/14792779543000084
📃 Cohen, Rogelberg, Allen and Luong (2011) 18 meeting design characteristics tested; 9 mattered, including agenda, punctuality, facilitator and the number of attendees. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021549
📃 Leach, Rogelberg, Warr and Burnfield (2009) Agenda and facilities predict perceived effectiveness through involvement, and meeting size lowers involvement. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-009-9092-6
📃 Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock and Rogelberg (2018) Meeting lateness, three studies. Starting late reduced satisfaction, effectiveness and the objective quality of ideas. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2276
📃 Lehmann-Willenbrock and Allen (2017) 32 videotaped groups. Late starts produced less solution-focused talk for the rest of the meeting. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329488417696725
📃 Bluedorn, Turban and Love (1999) 111 five-person groups. Sit-down meetings ran 34% longer than stand-up meetings and produced no better decisions. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.2.277
📃 Bryan and Locke (1967) Parkinson's law tested: people given more time take more time. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(67)90021-9
📃 Shockley and colleagues (2021) Four-week field experiment, 103 employees. Camera on meant more fatigue and less voice, most of all for women and newer staff. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000948
📃 Bennett, Campion, Keeler and Keener (2021) 279 video meetings. Muting and belonging both predicted lower fatigue afterwards. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000906
📃 Nurmi and Pakarinen (2023) Heart-rate data from 382 real meetings. Virtual meeting fatigue is drowsiness from under-stimulation, not exhaustion. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000362
📃 Mroz, Allen, Verhoeven and Shuffler (2018) The review of the science of workplace meetings, with a checklist. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418776307
📃 Rogelberg, Kreamer and Gray (2025) Thirty years of meeting science, in one review. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031925-091223
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
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