Meetings Are Miserable

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

The Washington Post columnist George Will was once asked to explain his long-standing distaste for American football. The sport is, he responded, “violence punctuated by committee meetings.” To my mind, this is a savage condemnation not so much because of the violence, but because of the meetings.

If you, like many people, think work meetings are a huge waste of time, that might be because most meetings keep employees from, well, : that productivity was 71 percent higher when meetings were reduced by 40 percent. Unnecessary meetings waste in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the software company Atlassian. And in case you’re wondering, COVID made things worse: The number of meetings required of employees has .