TBSP (Too Busy, Summary Please): Meetings aren’t broken because they’re too long or too crowded. Executives now lose nearly 23 hours a week to them, and a shorter agenda barely touches the real problem underneath it. Two CEOs—and a 1987 psychology study on group brainstorming—land on the same fix: the room does better when people bring an actual opinion instead of just a seat. This week: a three-step habit for showing up with a point of view instead of just showing up, useful whether you’re running the meeting or just sitting in it.
If you want to know how to make meetings more productive, start with the math: executives now spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, more than double the under-ten-hours a week they logged back in the 1960s.1 Somewhere in the decades between, the meeting quietly became the default setting for how work gets discussed, decided, and delayed. Most of the advice for fixing that focuses on the wrong lever—trim the invite list, shrink the agenda, buy better scheduling software. None of it touches the actual problem sitting in the room.
The actual problem is showing up empty. Not empty-handed—empty-minded: a chair full of people who never formed a real opinion before the meeting started, waiting to see which way the conversation breaks before picking a side. It’s the same tell as walking into a test without having opened the book—everyone in the room can spot the difference between a real answer and a guess dressed up as one. AT&T CEO John Stankey has been blunt about wanting the opposite from the people in his own meetings. “Don’t walk in there and just be an observer,” he’s said. “When you have a point of view, it shouldn’t just be some uninformed opinion. It should be a point of view that’s built on facts, information, and data. I crave that.”2 JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon runs on a version of the same standard—he’s said he’s never upset when someone tells him he’s wrong, because landing on the right answer matters more than anyone’s comfort, his own included.
The Real Meeting Problem Isn’t the Calendar
Cutting a meeting from sixty minutes to thirty, or from twelve invitees to six, treats a symptom. The room can be small, the agenda tight, the clock generous, and the meeting can still go nowhere—because nobody in it did the thinking beforehand. Stankey and Dimon aren’t describing a scheduling fix. They’re describing a preparation standard, and no calendar app, meeting-free Friday, or AI note-taker installs that for you.
How to Make Meetings More Productive Without Touching the Calendar
The fix is a personal discipline, not a company policy, and it works whether you’re running the meeting or just sitting in it.
- Do the thinking before you walk in. Read the doc, pull the numbers, form a rough opinion—on your own time, before the room fills up.
- Bring a position, not just a presence. Say what you think and why, even if it turns out to be wrong. A wrong, well-reasoned position moves a conversation forward; a shrug does not.
- Ask yourself honestly if you belong in the room. If you genuinely can’t do the first two for this particular meeting, that’s real information—about the meeting, or about the invite list, or both.
The first step isn’t just a nice idea. Psychologists Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe tested it directly: people who generated ideas alone before comparing notes produced nearly twice as many as groups who tried to think them up together in real time.3 Whatever the room ends up deciding together, it decides better when the thinking happened before anyone sat down.
Nobody enjoys the third question, which is exactly why it gets skipped most often. But the alternative—sitting through a meeting with nothing formed and nothing to say—costs the same hour either way. The only difference is whether that hour was spent thinking or spent waiting to see what everyone else thinks first.
There’s a version of this same instinct behind the clearing your head of open loops before you actually need it clear idea from the GTD Method. Walking into a meeting with a formed point of view is the same move, a beat earlier—do the clearing and the deciding before the room is watching.
None of this requires a bigger title or a louder voice. It requires deciding, before the invite even loads on the calendar, that there’s going to be something real to say. That’s really how to make meetings more productive: not a shorter clock, but a fuller head walking through the door.
The next time one shows up, the question worth asking isn’t whether the meeting could’ve been an email. It’s whether you showed up with a point of view, or just showed up.
Notes
- Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun, “Stop the Meeting Madness,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2017: “executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in [meetings], up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.”
- Preston Fore, “Like Jamie Dimon, AT&T CEO says if you attend a meeting, you need to show up prepared—he ‘craves’ people who don’t just sit back and observe,” Fortune, September 6, 2026.
- Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe, “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987: “nominal groups produced nearly twice as many different ideas as the real groups.”