The meeting as a patch

A meeting is often a workaround for a system that cannot tell people what they need to know. Some meetings are real work. Most are repairs. Learning to tell the two apart is worth the effort.

Try a small audit. Go down the recurring meetings on your calendar and, for each one, ask what would actually break if it stopped. A surprising number turn out to exist only to move one piece of information from one person to another, a status or a number or a decision, that a half-decent system would have moved on its own.

Real work and repair work

Some meetings are genuinely generative. You put people in a room precisely because the thinking needs the friction of other people pushing back in real time. Protect those. But the status meeting, the Monday sync, the standing check-in that everyone attends and nobody remembers: those are usually patches stretched over an information gap, and patches have a habit of quietly becoming permanent.

The test is simple enough. If the meeting exists to repair a leak, go fix the pipe. If it exists to make something new, defend it.