The Real Cost of Meetings - Processed Debt

If you’ve ever set a New Year’s resolution you didn’t intend to keep, you already understand the hidden economics of meetings. We tell ourselves the ritual will make us better. Then we realize the ritual mostly made us feel better.

I see it every January. We vow to be healthier, write daily, get organized. Then life sneezes on us during a flight and the plan stalls. That’s fine for personal goals, but in business we do the same thing with meetings. We schedule them to relieve anxiety, not to produce outcomes. The calendar fills. The work doesn’t move.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most meetings are stress transactions. Leaders trade an hour of everyone’s time for the fleeting comfort of “we talked about it.” That talk rarely includes the thing that actually makes a process real: a clear measure that proves the time was worth it.

Think about the types of meetings you’ve sat through. The pre-meeting to prep the deck. The meeting to walk through the deck. The follow-up meeting to debrief the deck. If you never felt pressure to show a result between them, you weren’t in a process. You were in a ceremony.

The turn for me came when I reframed resolutions as practice. Not “I will become a different person,” but “I will practice three specific behaviors today.” In work, that looks like daily wins, weekly plans, and a short client status that says what happened and what happens next. It takes ten minutes. Clients relax because they see momentum. I relax because the ritual includes a report.

That sequence matters: prescriptive, ritual, report. Prescriptive is the how. Keep it lightweight and human. What decision are we making, and what artifact proves it happened? Ritual is the how often. Put it on the calendar, but cap the time and the attendee list. Thirty minutes. Five people. Report is the outcome. One sentence or one screenshot that says “we moved this.” If there’s nothing to report, the ritual didn’t work.

Now place meetings inside that frame. A good meeting is a short, recurring ritual that exists only to generate a reportable outcome. Decision made. Blocker removed. Draft approved. Handoff completed. If your invite doesn’t name the outcome and the artifact you’ll produce, you’re buying stress relief at the price of throughput.

Parkinson’s Law makes the invoice bigger. Work expands to fill the time we give it, so a sixty-minute block invites sixty minutes of meandering. Shrink the container and the conversation sharpens. Better yet, remove the meeting whenever a tighter artifact will do. A short Loom, a one-pager, or a decision tree with owners often beats twelve people narrating a slide everyone read on mute.

Two practical swaps:

1. Replace “status meeting” with a weekly written status that follows last-week/next-week/risks. Ask leaders to respond in-thread with reprioritizations. You get alignment without the airtime tax.

2. Replace “brainstorm meeting” with an asynchronous prompt and a 24-hour idea window. Meet only to rank the top five and pick one to test this week. Tie the test to a single metric. That’s the report.

If you must meet, make the cost visible. List attendees and their hourly rates in the invite. Multiply by the duration. Then state the outcome you’ll produce that is worth more than that number. This small dose of transparency forces the same discipline we preach in budgets and roadmaps.

In theory, meetings help us act together. In practice, bad meetings help us avoid acting alone. The difference is whether the ritual demands a report.

Process Debt Truth: When a meeting doesn’t end with proof of progress, you didn’t buy alignment. You financed avoidance.