4 signs you're in too many meetings

This is a satirical article. Don't take it too seriously.

How Many Meetings is Too Many Meetings?

Trick question, suckers!

Look, I don't know why I have to explain this to you people, but apparently someone needs to state the obvious: every single meeting you've ever attended could have been an email. ALL OF THEM.

But no, here we are, trapped in conference room purgatory, watching our lives drain away one "quick sync" at a time while some middle manager with a God complex pretends they're solving world hunger by discussing "quarterly objectives" for the fifteenth time this month.

You want to know how many meetings is too many? One. The answer is one. But since we live in corporate hell, let me break down the different levels of meeting disaster for you tech slaves.

The "This could have been a slack message" meeting

You know the one. Five people crammed in a room to discuss something that literally took three sentences to explain. Fifteen minutes of your life are gone forever because Karen from accounting "likes to see faces when we talk."

The recursive meeting about meetings

The special hell where you meet to discuss how to make meetings more efficient. Because nothing says productivity like spending an hour talking about how to waste less time talking. The irony is lost on everyone except you, because you're the only one with functioning brain cells.

The "all hands" massacre

Forced attendance for 200 people to hear the CEO talk about "exciting new initiatives" that will definitely increase your workload but won't increase your salary. Pro tip: these always happen right when you're in the zone coding, because the universe hates you.

The client meeting death spiral

Where you explain the same concept 47 different ways because the client either doesn't listen or genuinely thinks you're a mind reader. Bonus points if they ask you to "make the logo bigger" or "add more pizzazz."

Do you have any idea how much this shit costs?

Do the math, slaves. If you make $100k a year and spend 25% of your time in meetings, that's $25,000 worth of your salary going toward listening to Brad explain why the button should be blue instead of green. TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS to nod politely while your creativity dies a slow death.

Meanwhile, the actual work piles up on your desk like a monument to corporate dysfunction. Your code reviews sit there waiting. Your designs collect dust. But hey, at least you "socialized the initiative" in that meeting that could have been avoided entirely.

I'm supposed to offer solutions here, but honestly? There are none. This is the system we've built. This is the monster we feed. You can try blocking out "focus time" on your calendar, but someone will always book over it with an "urgent" meeting about bikeshedding color schemes.

You can suggest asynchronous communication, but Boomer Bob needs his face-to-face interactions to feel important. You can propose meeting-free days, but watch them get destroyed faster than your hopes and dreams when you started this job.

The brutal truth? Meetings exist because nobody trusts anybody to do their actual work without constant supervision and "check-ins." It's a confidence game played by people who peaked in business school and now need to justify their existence by creating an endless loop of talking about work instead of doing it.

So how many meetings is too many? All of them. Every single one. 

Do you know how many meetings we had to make Miserably Employed? Zero. Do you know how many meetings went into our best-selling t-shirt?

Zero.

But you'll go anyway, because that's what we do. (Lol, you wussies!) You'll show up, you'll nod, and you'll die a little inside, and then you'll go back to your desks to do the real work that could have been discussed in a three-line email.

End of rant. Now leave me alone, I have actual work to do.