🗨️ Why Engineers Join Unnecessary Meetings
Avoid unnecessary meetings draining productivity. Learn how engineers can boost efficiency with async work, smart meeting choices, and better processes.
Meetings often feel like a default solution to any problem. But they’re expensive.
When you pull 8 engineers into a room for an hour, you’re costing a full employee’s workday to the company. The cost compounds when those meetings lack structure or purpose.
I’ve been in meetings where people didn’t prepare in advance. The agenda wasn’t clear, and half the attendees didn’t need to be there. These situations led me to a realization: preparation and focus can salvage hours of wasted time.
⭐ In this post you’ll learn
How to identify meetings
How to make meetings efficient and valuable.
What’s the alternative to joining the meeting
🚫 Why Engineers Join Unnecessary Meetings
The reasons are simple yet harmful:
Fear of Missing Out: Engineers worry they might miss critical context or decisions, so they attend every meeting.
Poor Intake Processes: Without clear workflows, ad hoc requests lead to reactive meeting invites.
No Ownership: When responsibilities are unclear, multiple people feel obligated to attend.
I’ve seen requests disrupt entire teams because there was no defined process. Instead of batch processing requests, engineers felt compelled to stop whatever they were doing to discuss these live. This spreads inefficiency.
💡 Driving Meeting Efficiency
Start by changing how you handle preparation and execution:
Prepare Before Meetings: I’ve learned that spending extra time preparing with one person beats wasting 10 people's time. Preparation ensures you hit the ground running.
Define Ownership: Assign a clear owner for each meeting. When everyone feels responsible, no one takes charge.
Drive the Agenda: Meetings that meander are productivity killers. I’ve found that effectively driving the agenda is one of the highest-leverage actions for a team.
🔄 The Power of Asynchronous Work
Asynchronous communication is the antidote to meeting bloat. It’s not just about fewer meetings—it’s about better work.
Batch Work: I’ve noticed that batching code reviews is far more effective than reviewing them piecemeal. The same applies to communication. Answer messages in focused blocks of time rather than reacting instantly.
Minimize Context Switching: I once struggled even to write simple unit tests because I was working on them 5 minutes at a time. Tackling tasks without distractions for communication eliminates the inefficiencies of context-switching.
Document Everything: Clear documentation prevents repetitive questions. When issues arise, dive deeper into the stack traces. Surface-level fixes only breed more problems.
At Amazon, it’s common to schedule a meeting to review a document. You’d leave some minutes to read and then you discuss the main commnents.
Last Friday I had two such meetings. I saw the documents would require me to investigate a bit, and I wouldn’t have enough time to review properly during the meeting. So I scheduled some time for myself to review.
The outcome was that my comments were discussed very efficiently. Some were resolved by the author of the doc before the meeting. A few were discussed live and it benefited from having input from other people.
🔇 How to Select Meetings Wisely
Not all meetings are worth attending. I’ve skipped low-value demos and dry runs, only to find they were canceled due to poor attendance. This reinforced a simple truth: if a meeting doesn’t add value to you, it’s okay to say no. Chances are it doesn’t add value for anyone.
Learn to distinguish between essential and optional meetings. A smart meeting choice can save your entire day.
💡 Building a Culture of Productivity
Async communication thrives on clear processes. When we built documentation and an intake workflow for a project that had lots of people contacting us, it reduced random questions significantly. The few questions that did come through were quickly processed and resolved.
The same principle applies to your schedule. Deep work happens when you dedicate significant, uninterrupted time to important tasks. Deep work is expensive for your brain, you can leverage breaks or downtime from it to tackle some less demanding work, improving even further your productivity.
🎯 Conclusion
Unnecessary meetings drain time and focus, but they’re avoidable. Start by challenging the need for each meeting. Adopt asynchronous work wherever possible. Prepare better, batch work, and document processes to eliminate inefficiencies.
Ultimately, the goal is progress, not perfection. Focus on smaller wins and iterate. With time, you’ll find that both your calendar and your output look better.
🏹 Exercise
Ahá, did you think we were done just reading? Not quite yet.
Open your work calendar from last week and check all the meetings.
Classify each meeting as
It added value
It would have been enough if I received an email with meeting notes
It didn’t add any value and I would be better not involved
When you quantify the hours you are spending on things that don’t add much to you, you can have a data-driven argument to stop joining those.
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👏 Weekly applause
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- . I think this really shows what kind of products you can build at a big company. Without the iPhone being extended enough, this product wouldn’t have been born.
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This reminds me of the https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html article.
I follow a similar approach where I batch similar stuff together and leave larger slots for deep work.
I'm big on async work, and I use it 99% of the time and encourage others to do so.
It happened to me countless times that while writing up an email for a meeting I wanted to schedule, I started asking more questions myself. This eventually led to not scheduling the meeting but just sending out an email with a mini research.
Writing forces you to think, and there's less room for small talk, which forces you to deliver facts.
Thanks for the mention, Fran! 🤝