Portrait of a young businessman pointing at black alarm clock standing against grey concrete wall Image by freepik
Oh, look at you. Mr. Big Shot Meeting Organizer. You wrapped up your pointless status update in 22 minutes instead of the scheduled 30, and now you’re sitting there with that self-satisfied smirk, bestowing upon us peasants the generous gift of “eight minutes back.”
“I know everyone’s busy, so I wanted to give you some time back!”
You didn’t give me anything. You took 22 minutes of my life that I’m never getting back. The fact that you didn’t take the full 30 you threatened me with doesn’t make you a hero. That’s like a mugger stealing $20 from my wallet instead of $30 and expecting a thank you card.
Here’s a radical concept that’s apparently going to blow your tiny mind: meetings don’t have a minimum runtime requirement. There’s no Meeting Police who’s going to bust down the conference room door if you end at 11:17 instead of 11:30. Your Outlook invitation is not a binding contract that must be fulfilled to the second.
You scheduled 30 minutes because you’re terrible at estimating how long things take and you wanted to build in a buffer for your own incompetence. That’s fine. We all do it. But when you realize at minute 22 that you’ve covered everything, you don’t get to act like you’re doing us a favor by not continuing to waste our time discussing the font choice on slide seven.
And here’s the thing that really grinds my gears: you’re not “unblocking” me or “giving me time back.” I was already blocked. That’s what being in your meeting means. I’m blocked from doing my actual job. The job I’m measured on. The work that actually matters. You ending early isn’t a gift—it’s just you stopping the thing you shouldn’t have been doing in the first place for that long.
It’s the professional equivalent of someone standing on your foot for 22 minutes, then stepping off and expecting gratitude because they didn’t stand there for the full 30 minutes they warned you about.
“Well, I didn’t want to schedule a shorter meeting in case we needed the full time.”
Then schedule 20 minutes. If you need more, you can always ask people to stay. But no, that would require you to actually justify extending the meeting. Much easier to hold everyone hostage from the start and then play the magnanimous benefactor when you deign to release us slightly ahead of schedule.
You know what would actually give me time back? Not having the meeting at all. Sending an email. Using Slack. Making a decision without requiring 12 people to synchronously stare at each other through webcams while you slowly read through slides that you could have just shared.
But sure, pat yourself on back for only wasting 22 minutes of collective productivity instead of 30. That’s 96 minutes of human labor across the 12 people you trapped in that conference room. Two person-hours of work, gone forever, discussing something that could have been a three-paragraph email.
Next time you want to “give me my time back,” here’s an idea: don’t take it in the first place. Send a document. Make a decision. Trust that people can read. Do literally anything except putting “30 minutes” on my calendar because you can’t be bothered to figure out how long your update actually takes.
And when you inevitably ignore all of this and schedule another meeting anyway, at least have the decency to end it when it’s actually done without fishing for praise like you just cured cancer by clicking “End Meeting” at 10:52 instead of 11:00.
You didn’t give me anything back. You just stopped taking.
Meeting fatigue is real, and by 11:47 AM on a Tuesday, I’ve already lived three lifetimes.
The morning started with a “quick sync” that wasn’t quick. Then a “brief standup” where everyone had an essay prepared. Followed by the dreaded “let’s workshop this” session where seven people talked in circles for forty-five minutes about a decision that should have been an email.
And now I’m sitting here, fluorescent lights humming their electric death song, listening to Janet from Accounting explain her weekend plans while I’m supposed to be focused on Q4 projections, and all I can think is: I would trade my entire 401(k) for fifteen minutes in a sensory deprivation chamber.
The Noise Never Stops
You know what nobody warns you about when you take an office job? It’s not the work that kills you. It’s the being perceived that slowly drains your life force.
Between Slack pings, calendar invites, “got a minute?” desk drop-bys, and the guy in the next cubicle who insists on speakerphone calls, your brain never gets a moment to just… exist. In silence. Processing nothing. Defending nothing. Contributing nothing.
The meeting fatigue compounds because there’s no recovery time. It’s back-to-back calendar Tetris from 9 AM until you escape, and even lunch isn’t safe because that’s when people want to “grab lunch and chat about the project.”
The Float Tank Fantasy
I’ve started having this recurring daydream. I’m in one of those sensory deprivation tanks—you know, the isolation chambers filled with super-salty water where you float in complete darkness and silence. No light. No sound. No Dave from Marketing asking if I “got a chance to look at his deck.”
No one can @ me. No one can schedule over my lunch. No one can add me to a distribution list for their team-building bowling event. The tank doesn’t have Wi-Fi. The tank doesn’t have a door that coworkers can knock on. The tank is an impenetrable fortress of solitude.
We’re Not Built for This
Here’s the thing about meeting fatigue: our brains weren’t designed to be “on” for eight consecutive hours. We’re not meant to maintain professional enthusiasm from 9 to 5 while simultaneously managing seventeen different communication channels and pretending we care about the new org chart.
Humans need downtime. Not “checking your phone” downtime. Not “scrolling Twitter while half-listening to another meeting” downtime. Actual downtime. The kind where your nervous system can finally unclench and your brain can sort through the chaos without someone asking you to “circle back” on something.
But instead of acknowledging this fundamental human need, corporate culture decided that the real solution to information overload is more meetings. Meeting about the meetings. Meetings about why meetings are inefficient. All-hands meetings to discuss meeting culture.
The irony would be funny if it wasn’t slowly killing me.
The Afternoon Stretch
It’s 2:30 PM now. I have three more hours to go. Two more meetings scheduled. Seventeen unread Slacks. Forty-three emails that came in while I was in meetings about work instead of doing work.
My kingdom for a sensory deprivation chamber.
Or, you know, like… a meeting-free Wednesday. One day a week where everyone collectively agrees to shut up and just work. Where “collaboration” doesn’t mean “interrupt each other constantly.”
That would be nice too.
But until then, I’ll be here, mainlining coffee and mentally calculating how much PTO I have left, wondering if “acute meeting fatigue” counts as a valid sick day reason.
You know that meeting attendance chicken game where everyone suddenly becomes very, very busy exactly 30 seconds before a 10+ person meeting is supposed to start? Yeah, that one. The one nobody talks about but everybody plays.
Long tables with black chairs in a large meeting room. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons
It’s 2:59 PM. Your calendar dings with that cheerful little notification that makes your stomach drop: “Meeting starts in 1 minute.” You look at the attendee list. Twelve people. You do the math in your head. If twelve people are invited, maybe six will show up. If you’re one of the first three to join, the odds of having to actually contribute skyrocket. If you’re lucky and join seventh or eighth, you can probably ride this meeting out in blissful silence with your camera off and your microphone muted, occasionally nodding at nothing.
But here’s the thing: everyone else is doing the exact same calculation.
The Strategic Late Arrival
There’s an unspoken art to joining a large meeting “fashionably late” without it being so late that someone notices. The sweet spot is somewhere between 2-4 minutes after the official start time. Early enough that the meeting hasn’t really gotten going yet, late enough that you’re definitely not going to be voluntold to take notes or “kick us off.”
The beauty of the 2-4 minute delay is that it comes with a built-in excuse library:
“Sorry, I was on another call that ran over”
“Sorry, had to step away for a second”
“Sorry, Teams was acting weird”
Or the classic non-apology: silence plus immediately going on mute
Nobody questions it. Nobody can question it, because they were playing the exact same game.
The Waiting Room Standoff
Virtual meetings have added a delicious new dimension to meeting attendance chicken: the waiting room standoff. You join the meeting, you see you’re in the waiting room, and you notice there are two other participants also waiting.
Now the game becomes: do you leave and rejoin in 60 seconds, hoping that someone else will have been admitted by then? Do you just sit there, accepting your fate as a potential early joiner? Do you send a chat message to the organizer who definitely isn’t paying attention to the waiting room because they’re also hoping someone else joins first?
I’ve seen waiting rooms with seven people in them while the actual meeting room sits empty except for the organizer, who is frantically refreshing their email and pretending they can’t see the growing crowd of digital loiterers outside their virtual door.
The Camera Conundrum
The meeting starts. Six brave souls (or six people who got trapped joining early) are sitting there with their cameras on, staring at each other in a Brady Bunch grid of awkwardness. The meeting organizer is trying to make small talk while nervously glancing at the participant count, which is ticking up one person every 45 seconds.
Then someone joins with their camera off. Then another. Then three more in rapid succession, all camera-off. Now the early joiners are stuck. Do they turn their cameras off and look like they’re bailing on the meeting? Do they keep them on and look like try-hards? The meeting organizer, feeling the silent pressure, makes a weak attempt: “Feel free to turn your cameras on if you’d like!”
Nobody does.
The Mute-Olympics
Joining late grants you the precious gift of the muted entrance. You can slip into a meeting like a ninja, your name appearing in the participant list with all the fanfare of a whisper. The early joiners didn’t have this luxury. They joined when the room was quiet, when every microphone activation sounded like a foghorn, when the organizer was still hopeful enough to greet people by name.
“Oh hey Sarah! Good to see you! And there’s Marcus! How was your weekend, Marcus?”
Marcus had to answer. Marcus had to engage. Marcus made small talk about his weekend for 90 seconds while eight other people were waiting in the hallway, synchronizing their watches, preparing to execute the perfect late-but-not-too-late entrance.
By the time the meeting actually starts, Marcus is exhausted from carrying the entire pre-meeting conversation, and the late joiners are sitting pretty, cameras off, mics muted, ready to contribute absolutely nothing for the next 60 minutes.
The Peak Late-Join
There exists a theoretical perfect moment for joining a meeting that I call the “Peak Late-Join.” This is the moment when:
The meeting has officially started
The organizer has given up waiting for more people
They’ve moved past introductions
They haven’t yet gotten to anything of substance
Nobody is keeping track of who just joined
The Peak Late-Join typically occurs somewhere between 4-7 minutes after the scheduled start time, depending on the organizer’s patience level and the corporate culture around punctuality. Join at Peak Late-Join and you’ve achieved meeting attendance nirvana: you’re here, you’re technically not late, and there’s absolutely zero chance you’re getting voluntold to do anything.
The Participation Probability Matrix
Let’s be honest about the math here. In a 12-person meeting:
Join in the first minute: 80% chance you’ll have to actively participate
Join in minutes 2-4: 45% chance of participation
Join at minutes 5-6: 20% chance of participation
Join at minute 7+: 15% chance anyone remembers you’re there
The truly advanced players have spreadsheets. They’ve calculated the optimal join time for every recurring meeting on their calendar. They know that the Monday morning team sync doesn’t really start until minute 8 because Brad is always late. They know that the Friday afternoon retro has a critical mass threshold of 6 people before it kicks off. They know exactly when to maximize their presence credit while minimizing their participation liability.
The Organizer’s Dilemma
Spare a thought for the meeting organizer, sitting there at 2:59 PM, watching their nice neat 3:00 PM start time approach like a freight train. They’ve got their agenda ready. They’ve got their slides loaded. They’ve got their talking points memorized.
2:59 PM: One person in the meeting (them) 3:00 PM: Two people in the meeting 3:01 PM: Two people in the meeting 3:02 PM: Four people in the meeting 3:03 PM: Six people in the meeting 3:04 PM: Nine people in the meeting 3:05 PM: Nine people in the meeting 3:06 PM: Eleven people in the meeting
Do they start at 3:00 when only two people are there and then have to recap everything five times as people trickle in? Do they wait until 3:06 and look like they can’t manage a schedule? Do they passive-aggressively say “okay, let’s get started” at 3:02 when the room is still half-empty?
The organizer is playing their own game of chicken: “Who cracks first, me or the absent attendees?”
Spoiler alert: the organizer always cracks first.
The Post-Meeting Guilt
After successfully executing a flawless late join, spending 55 minutes on mute with your camera off, and contributing exactly zero words to the conversation, you’ll feel a tiny pang of guilt. A whisper in the back of your mind asking “should I have participated more?”
This guilt lasts approximately 12 seconds, until your calendar dings again.
“Meeting starts in 1 minute.”
And the game begins anew.
The Unspoken Rules
Like any good game of chicken, meeting attendance chicken has rules that everyone follows but nobody acknowledges:
Never call out the late joiners (you’ll be one next time)
Never join a meeting early enough to be alone with the organizer
If you join late, apologize once and then never speak again
The first person to join bears the conversation burden until person number three arrives
Camera-off is acceptable after the 5-minute mark
Nobody tracks attendance in a 10+ person meeting anyway
The Future of Meeting Chicken
As we’ve settled into this remote and hybrid work world, meeting attendance chicken has evolved from an occasional tactic into a full-blown strategic discipline. Some companies have tried to fight it with “cameras on” policies or “must join on time” rules, but these are the flailings of a dying regime. You cannot stop meeting attendance chicken any more than you can stop the tide.
The game is eternal. The game is inevitable. The game is happening right now in a conference room (virtual or physical) near you.
Someone is looking at their clock. Someone is doing the math. Someone is waiting just one more minute before they click that “Join” button.
And somewhere, a meeting organizer is sitting alone in a virtual room, wondering where everybody is, knowing full well that everyone is out there, together, waiting for everyone else to go first.
Have your own meeting attendance chicken stories? Of course you do. We all do. Because we’re all playing the same game, hoping nobody notices we’re playing, while simultaneously knowing that everyone else is playing too.
Just remember: the only winning move is to join late enough that nobody expects anything from you, but not so late that anyone notices you joined late. It’s a delicate balance. An art form, really.
Good luck out there. May your joins be strategically timed and your participation be mercifully minimal.
