Meeting Debt

Did You Know that most teams are carrying “meeting debt” the way they carry tech debt - quietly, expensively, and for longer than they admit. Surveys show employees spend 11+ hours a week in meetings, with 65–70% saying they regularly waste time and that meetings block deep work.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about hidden work, operations as brand, IT as a revenue lever, and healthcare throughput. There’s one blocker that cuts across all of them: meeting debt.

Too many recurring meetings quietly erode focus, creativity, and execution. Employees now spend roughly a third of their week in meetings, and executives can spend 20+ hours - often in sessions they rate as unproductive or duplicative. It’s no surprise people report that inefficient and excessive meetings are top productivity killers.

So let’s test something together:

Poll:
If you cancelled 25% of your recurring meetings, what would you gain?
① Focus
② Innovation
③ Sanity
④ Nothing

In IT, banking, manufacturing, and healthcare/behavioral health, the teams doing the real work are also the ones most buried in recurring calls and check‑ins. That backlog of meetings makes it harder to ship good ideas, fix broken journeys, and improve patient flow.

👉 Use the comments to share one tactic you use to reclaim time—from killing orphaned recurring meetings to replacing status calls with better dashboards. We’ll share a few of Kaiban’s favorites in the thread.

If you suspect meeting debt is quietly dragging your roadmap, throughput, or revenue down, let’s talk - we help leaders redesign how work moves, not just add one more meeting about it.