The Setup

It began the way all professional disasters begin: with a calendar invite that said "Quick Sync."

The word "quick" in a meeting title is the corporate equivalent of "I'll be ready in five minutes" — a well-intentioned fiction that everyone pretends to believe.

The Participants

Six people. All employed. All presumably busy. All with the ability to type.

Yet here we were, assembled in Conference Room B (the one with the flickering light and the chair that squeaks), about to spend 47 minutes discussing something that could have been:

"Hey team, we're moving the launch date to Thursday. Questions? Great, thanks."

Three sentences. One email. Done.

The Meeting

Minute 1-8: Small talk about the weather, the coffee machine, someone's weekend plans. Standard pre-meeting rituals.

Minute 9-15: Someone asks if we're waiting for anyone else. We are not. We proceed.

Minute 16-23: The organizer explains why we're here. It takes seven minutes to explain what should have been one sentence. This is not a good sign.

Minute 24-31: Discussion begins. Someone asks a question that was answered in the explanation. We re-explain.

Minute 32-40: Tangential conversation about a completely different project. No one stops it.

Minute 41-45: Someone asks "so, just to clarify..." and repeats everything we've already covered.

Minute 46: Someone says "we should probably wrap this up."

Minute 47: We adjourn. Mission accomplished. Time reclaimed: zero minutes.

The Email That Could Have Been

Subject: Launch Date Change

Body: Moving the product launch to Thursday instead of Tuesday due to vendor delay. Updated timeline attached. Let me know if you have concerns.

Thanks,
[Name]

Time to read: 12 seconds.
Time to reply: 30 seconds if you have a question.
Total time invested: Less than one minute.

Time saved per person: 46 minutes.
Time saved collectively: 276 minutes (4.6 hours).

The Lesson

The lesson, if there is one, is that meetings are expensive. Not in money (though also in money), but in collective attention.

A status update. A date change. Information that could have been delivered asynchronously, absorbed individually, and responded to if necessary.

But no. We met. We discussed. We left. The spreadsheet remains unjudged. The emails remain unsent. The work remains undone.

And somewhere, in another building, another six people are filing into Conference Room B for a "quick sync."

It never ends.