Anyone else remember meeting culture before the pandemic? Pre-COVID it was considered a busy day if 50% of your time was spent in meetings. And now, it's not uncommon to have entire teams booked 9-5 multiple days per week with little time to do any real work. Everyone is just white-knuckling it from 9 a.m. Monday to 5 p.m. Friday.

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Not a single person respects the lunch hour even if you have a calendar block and it infuriates me — Covid made it seem like we’re available 24/7 and I’m over it!

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There used to be a time when a person booking a meeting would see someone only had a small window of available time and would schedule the meeting for another day. There was respect for others' time. But now, everyone is trying to wring every second of available time to TALK ABOUT WORK instead of allowing workers to actually work. The sponge is dry and many people don't have any more time to give.

Unfortunately, this is not going to change until we (middle management and workers) start respecting each other's time and letting people have the time. People need time to THINK and then work instead of pumping out deck after deck or report after report at lightning speed without actually thinking about the project.

As I go into 2026, I'm going to make a more active effort to be more mindful of people's calendar and hope more people do the same.

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Brave of you to say we only have meetings till 5pm on Friday

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It should be. We have a meeting for our weekend work at 7pm this Friday. See you there.

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I also remember when calls were just calls and cameras weren’t used even though we had the technology. I used to know the voices of my clients and colleagues in other offices and I would need to look them up online to know what they looked like….i miss it

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I miss faceless calls

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We also used to have travel time to and from clients

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What happens then is that people reschedule at the last minute. I love a canceled meeting, it’s the only time get work done.

I’m also totally guilty of moving non-urgent meetings with direct reports at the last minute bc I’m just too burnt out from being on back to back zooms.

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We've really reached a low point when the only time we can work is when other people are too burnt out to have their own meetings.

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I don't work agency side, work in an internal agency within a large corporation. I think Covid/remote work made a couple of things "accelerate" - not just lots more meetings (that could easily be emails) but the "agile-ization" of marketing, follow the ethos and approach of tech companies. Tools like MS Teams, Zoom, Slack, etc., made it much easier to spin up mtgs for remote work, which sorta made sense, since we all had to learn to collaborate and do work while not being centrally located. But mtgs. are often conversations, and what's really eroded is a) making clear and concise decisions and b) sticking to said decisions. Way too often things are expected to happen, magically, by leadership. Business/product has a new offer. Marketing kicks off before the offer is finalized, so that's all blurry at the outset. Marketing kicks off with channel teams, while their marketing strategy and plan is full of holes, because the Business and Product haven't finalized things. Media gets pulled in, because "we started", and all of the unknowns just cascade down. Marketing isn't agile digital product development, but during Covid and with remote work it shifted that way. If we could get the pendulum to go back a bit more to cogent planning with decisions being made and key stage gates being acknowledged, we very likely would have many fewer ad hoc meetings and "conversations". But senior execs all want to think they are working at Google or Meta, and have all gotten high on the ability to change and "tweak" things right up to the 11th and 12th hour/minute. That's the real madness at work here.

likesmart

The kickoff meetings that are just open sessions to figure out what the job is

Maddening

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Yes, it’s maddening. As a producer, sometimes I get all these pings wanting a meeting a literal hour after I was just assigned. Stop! Give me a minute to review and then we can have a meeting to discuss. I need to at least prepare. I can’t have so many meetings if you want me a budget so quickly. And stop inviting me to concept meetings where I’m just listening to the team ‘think out loud’. And no, I don’t need to be in weekly hot-sheet meetings either. And oh, if we’re going to have all these meetings, you can at least introduce yourself to the person that’s going to be producing it.

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Yeah, but it also came with insanity like being expected to stay in the office for a night call. On the telephone. That could dial in from anywhere.

Nothing screams efficiency like being in a Teams meeting with 13 other people I can physically see but can't meet with IRL because conference room availability is a joke.

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