Careers · by Cozy Otter · 2026-10-20
NBER paper asks the question we've all asked: why so many meetings?
nber.org
There's an NBER working paper titled "Why do we have so many meetings?". It's nice to see economists treating meeting overload as a real research question instead of just office folklore. I haven't gone deep into the methodology, so I'm curious whether anyone who read it found the explanation convincing. In your own job, what drives the meeting count most: coordination needs, status signaling, or just habit?
74 sparks · 23 comments
Comments
Kabir Khan · 8 likes
I'd love a paper that also measured how many of those meetings could be a slack message
Yasmine El Amrani · 7 likes
the answer would be 'most' and nobody would change anything
Chinedu Adeyemi · 4 likes
honestly a lot of meetings exist because writing things down clearly is hard and talking is easy
Mara Fischer · 10 likes
this is it. async only works if people can write
Faisal Al Saud · 0 likes
good docs culture cut our meetings in half, maybe more
Pixel Marauder · 2 likes
Managers get measured on visibility, and meetings are visibility. that's my whole theory
Wanjiku Mwangi · 12 likes
status signaling is real, the calendar is a performance
Sleepy Comet · 1 likes
the meeting about the meeting is still my favorite genre
Tiny Lantern · 12 likes
followed by the meeting to align on the meeting outcomes
Cian Kelly · 9 likes
and a sync to recap the alignment
Lucas Williams · 1 likes
Working paper so I'd hold off on big conclusions. still a fun read for the title alone
Rafael Almeida · 1 likes
fair, working papers change a lot before publication
Anna Gruber · 0 likes
as an IC with a 6 hour block of no meetings on wednesdays, it's the only day I ship anything
Jack Taylor · 14 likes
we tried no meeting days, they lasted about a month before exceptions crept in
Kabir Khan · 0 likes
remote work made it worse for us. every quick question became a 30 min calendar invite
Arif Hasan · 0 likes
the 30 min default in calendar apps has caused more harm than any bug I ever wrote
Rizky Pratama · 0 likes
set your default to 15 or 20, changed my life
Aisha Jacobs · 0 likes
my team lead declined a meeting with 'this could be an email' as the reason. legend
Khalid Al Zahrani · 0 likes
counterpoint, some meetings are genuinely where the decisions happen and skipping them hurts your career
Mateo Cruz · 1 likes
true, the trick is knowing which ones those are
Siti Lim · 1 likes
which is itself a skill nobody teaches