This is such a company/team specific thing that I always find it odd if people come up with blanket "meetings are toxic!" statements.

And also meeting specific.

Some meetings can be useless even at companies with efficient meeting cultures.

True. But from my personal and peer experience, the majority of companies/teams have meetingitis. There is a nice idea to put a price tag on every meeting by multiplying hourly salary of every participant by the count of participants plus some coefficient. Then, everyone, including management, would be self-conscious and had to justify the time spent. Especially if you put it into a budget of every department.

Just because it’s an email/message doesn’t mean it’s not a meeting. The number of hours I’ve wasted having intricate discussions on Slack or Email instead of jumping in a call for 5 minutes is too damn high.

But everyone’s busy so finding those 5min of high bandwidth time is hard. Let’s smear it through a whole 2 hours of low bandwidth communication instead. Make sure everyone’s maximally distracted the whole time trying to juggle 3 things. Perfect.

Slack and email are self-documenting to some extent. A call is one, done, and gone forever.

That’s okay, a conversation log is no substitute for documentation. And we all know this, which is why we complain that discord is bad as a community support/documentation replacement.

And don’t even agree to the meeting. Be honest

In fact don’t even open emails. Many of them are just spam and waste your time reading them.

In fact don’t even give out an email address, because it can fall into the wrong hands.

Instead, simply post on social media and have your team or an AI do all the work.

It’s what famous people do. The more people who want a piece of you the more you have to pull back!

The Law of Two Feet https://medium.com/@hari.lhk/the-law-of-two-feet-continuous-...

If they're a waste of time, why did you join in the first place? If it's not obvious why I'm invited or what the agenda is, I'll do a tentative accept and tell them to message me if they need me to join for something specific.

I don' t have the option to decline participating in most meetings.

You shouldn't even turn in if the Meeting do not have a clear agenda alongside anu additionnal information that is desired to be brought in and what is the desired outcome.