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🔒 Leader’s Dispatch: The Meeting Apocalypse
📖 From Seamless to Smothered
Zoom promised connection. Teams promised efficiency. What we got instead was a plague of pings and a calendar grid that looks less like collaboration and more like a doomsday countdown clock.
The modern meeting has become the most expensive habit in business — a black hole that devours focus, morale, and entire afternoons.
The numbers back the pain you already feel: Microsoft research found weekly meeting time has exploded by 252% since 2020. Harvard Business Review reports 65% of managers say meetings keep them from doing actual work. Deloitte pegs the waste at $100 million a year per 1,000 employees. If meetings were a budget line, they’d be a fleet of luxury cars driven straight into a wall.
If Slack is an attention furnace, meetings are vampires. They don’t just burn hours — they drain life from teams. And like vampires, they multiply fast and hide in plain sight, disguised as “quick syncs” or “standing calls.”
⚠️ Archetypes of the Meeting Apocalypse
Every calendar has its culprits. You’ll recognize them instantly:
🔮 The Sync Summoner
Summons a 15-minute sync like a sorcerer — only to conjure an entire afternoon of follow-ups.
📈 The Update Hoarder
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