Meeting Inflation and Other Crimes Against Time

The thirty-minute meeting is the dollar of the modern enterprise. Both began as units of value. Both have been quietly debased.

In 2014, a thirty-minute meeting was a real thing. It had an agenda, three to four participants, and resulted, at the median, in a decision. The hour-long meeting was reserved for matters of consequence — strategy, planning, reorganization — and was attended by people who could be expected to remember what was said.

In 2026, the thirty-minute meeting is the new fifteen-minute meeting, the hour-long meeting is the new thirty-minute meeting, and the two-hour offsite has replaced what was previously called "a day of work." Each unit of time has retained its name. Each unit has lost roughly half of its substance.

This is meeting inflation. It is not new. It is, however, accelerating.

Mechanism

The cause is well-understood by anyone who has run a calendar. The mechanism is approximately:

• Calendar tools make meetings frictionless to create.
• Status culture makes presence at meetings a proxy for engagement.
• Hybrid work makes the meeting the place where work is now witnessed.
• AI notetakers make it costless to not pay attention.
• The recurring-meeting feature does the rest.

Each of these mechanisms is individually defensible. Frictionless scheduling is convenient. Engagement is desirable. Witnessed work is, in distributed teams, occasionally necessary. The notetaker is, on a tactical level, a productivity improvement.

The collective output is that the calendar has expanded to consume the work it was intended to coordinate.

A small empirical observation

The Bureau has been keeping informal track of one number: the share of a calendar week consumed by meetings, for senior individual contributors, in well-managed organizations. This is a difficult metric to source rigorously, so we will not pretend otherwise. What we will say is:

In 2015, that share, for a competent senior engineer, was approximately 15-20%.

In 2026, the same role, in the same kind of company, is at 45-60%.

This is not because the work has become more collaborative. It has not. It is because the coordination overhead of distributed, hybrid, asynchronous-but-also-very-synchronous work has approximately tripled, while the underlying work has remained the same size.

You do not have to take our word for this. You can run the calculation yourself. We recommend doing it once and then never doing it again, for reasons of mental health.

Inflation produces denominations

What is interesting — again, in the institutional sense — is that, as with any inflation, the system has responded by producing new denominations.

Where we used to have:

• 30-minute meetings (for normal matters)
• 60-minute meetings (for important matters)

We now have:

• 15-minute "syncs" (the old 30-minute meeting, renamed and pre-apologized for)
• 25-minute "alignments" (Google Calendar's default, which is itself a tell)
• 30-minute "checkpoints" (the new 15-minute meeting)
• 45-minute "deep dives" (the new 30-minute meeting)
• 60-minute "working sessions" (a meeting that admits no work will be done)
• 90-minute "strategy reviews" (the new 60-minute meeting)
• half-day "offsites" (the new full day)
• full-day "offsites" (the new week)
• multi-day "offsites" (the new quarter, plus expenses)

Each new denomination was introduced because the previous one was too long. Each is, on average, attended by 2-4x as many people. Each, on average, produces approximately the same number of decisions, which is to say: zero to one.

The forecast

We project that by 2028, the fifteen-minute meeting will itself have inflated to the point of needing replacement. We anticipate the introduction of the seven-minute "ping," likely scheduled in a tool that has not yet been founded but for which a Series A is already being raised. The ping will be attended by 6-9 people. It will produce a recording. The recording will be summarized by an AI. The summary will be summarized by a different AI. The second summary will be added to a weekly digest. The weekly digest will be read by no one.

This is not pessimism. This is trend extrapolation. The system is doing what the system was built to do. It is producing artifacts of coordination. The artifacts are now the product. The coordination is incidental.

What is to be done

Nothing.

We are serious about this. The Bureau has examined the question carefully and has concluded that the meeting-inflation cycle is self-reinforcing and substantially immune to intervention by any single party. Individuals who decline meetings are perceived as not engaged. Teams that hold fewer meetings are perceived as not aligned. Organizations that hold no meetings are perceived as having no culture, and are acquired or dissolved within twenty-four months.

The only available response is observation. To notice that this is happening. To name the denominations. To file the count. To keep, in some quiet file somewhere, a record of what the calendar used to mean.

That is the work.

The meeting will start in three minutes. You are welcome to attend.

— Filed by The Context Loss Bureau