In Defense of Meetings: Why One Hour Beats 1,000 Pings
Your Antidote to the Attention Economy
Work is the province of cattle.
—Dorothy Parker
Above: Meetings are to work what rests are to sheet music.
This week, I’ve been staring down an average of seven meetings a day.
Annoying? Yes.
Necessary? Also yes.
It’s the price of taking a long Fourth of July weekend with my family: fun in the sun, followed by a calamitous calendar.
In a recent meeting, I found myself drifting—bored with the subject matter and annoyed by the inefficiency—and an excerpt from my essay “Silence is the Answer” came to mind:
Most books should be articles.
Most articles should be tweets.
Most tweets should be emails.
Most emails should be text messages.
Most text messages should be silence.
The information could have been an email.
The updates could have been a Slack ping.
The decisions could have been made asynchronously.
But then it clicked: the real purpose of meetings isn’t information transfer. Instead, they serve as forcing functions that make people focus together, on time.1
The Paradox of Infinite Information
As I wrote in “Keeping Tabs on Your Tabs”
The amount of information consumed daily now is roughly equivalent to what an extremely educated individual would process in a lifetime 500 years ago…
I once read that social media is like being thirsty in the ocean. You look around and all you see is “water” but it’s salt water. The more you drink, the faster you die of dehydration.
In this digital deluge—where we zip along the surface rather than dive to the depths—meetings serve as life rafts.
Though much maligned and misunderstood, they make us stop, surface, and breathe.
In an age where everyone is competing for attention and time is scarce, meetings serve as the glue that holds the whole thing together. Again, they are not meant to convey information, but rather to:
Foster consensus in a world of infinite opinions
Force decisions that asynchronous threads defer
Counter dopamine hijacks that splinter attention all day long2
Of course, everything presented here hangs on one non-negotiable: the meeting has to both serve a purpose and be run well.
As Susan B. Wilson warns, “Meetings without an agenda are like a restaurant without a menu,” and Naval Ravikant doubles down: “Unnecessary meetings are a mutually assured destruction of time.”
The Dose Makes the Meeting
Paracelsus warned that “the dose makes the poison.” This applies to meetings just as it does to methane.
A well-run, 15-minute sync sparks progress; back-to-back Zoom marathons sap sanity.
After all, busyness ≠ productivity and motion ≠ progress.
Schedule the minimum (or better yet, just pick up the damn phone), ship an agenda, end with owners, and set deadlines.
Meetings are to work what rests are to sheet music.
They create necessary silence between notes that lets the melody make sense.
They force us to stop scrolling, close our tabs, and focus on the human voices in the room (or coming from the screen).
In a world of infinite digital chatter, the bounded time of a meeting creates sacred space for actual conversation, imposing structure on the chaos of modern work and life.
They force teams to:
Align on priorities
Decide on the record
Create accountability
Anchors in the Never-Ending Now
T. S. Eliot lamented that we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” A calendar invite plants a temporal anchor: “At 2PM on Tuesday, we will focus on this specific thing for exactly 60 minutes.” It forces us to go cold-turkey on easy dopamine, sit with discomfort, and wrestle complexity into clarity.
Yes, we can message anyone, anywhere, anytime—yet we’ve never felt more disconnected. The live constraint of a meeting reintroduces presence. Constraints breed creativity and boundaries permit depth.
As E.O. Wilson observed, “We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
Meetings are where the magic happens when synthesis just syncs, where the right information meets the right people at the right time.
So the next time you mutter, “This could have been an email,” remember: you’re not there for raw data. You’re there to forge consensus, assign responsibility, and get shit done in a world designed to splinter your focus and wreck your productivity.
Used properly, meetings are not a problem, but a solution. They transform the potential into the kinetic by separating signal from noise.
Time may be money. But in the attention economy, focus is the new currency and meetings are the mint.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
How AI and its autonomous workflows will impact this, God only knows.
A recent study showed that two weeks without smartphone internet significantly improved sustained attention. The effects were similar to being a decade younger.
Meetings definitely get a bad rap. I work mostly remotely with a distributed team of people who work in the field. My recurring meetings with them are a quick opportunity for them to update me all in one go and also for us to have a human interaction as two people on the same team. They aren’t often done well in my experience but, when they are, it can serve many simultaneous purposes.
I love this Tom. For another reason here: meetings are a profound focusing function for self-inquiry, too: especially as we learn so much about who we are by paying attention to our interactions with others in the here-and-now. I've been on a huge Yalom kick (five books in now) because of how he writes about directing our attention back to the therapeutic qualities of our relationships with each other.
To shift registers a bit, but make the same point: meetings provide a practice ground for cultivating loving kindness, sympathetic joy, emotional clarity. Propertly attuned, they can be an active practice of self-emptying.
So I LOVED the metaphor of rests and musical notes here. Just brilliant man.