This Is What Happens When There Are Too Many Meetings⁠↗

At home, work is especially leaky: Leisure bleeds into labor (reading TMZ during a Zoom meeting) and work seeps into leisure (answering emails at the dinner table).

Home and work used to have stronger geographical and technological boundaries: We left our house, drove to an office or factory, and then returned home, leaving the tools of work behind. Today, most knowledge work is basically just communication, which makes it indistinguishable from a lot of leisure. Chat with a colleague, or a friend; call a client, or a sibling: The biggest difference between these activities is the person on the other end of the horn. As work becomes more like life, it also becomes more of life.

At a deep level, meeting inflation is about the outdated expectation that all office work ought to be synchronous, or happening at the same time for everyone. Meetings require synchronicity: Everybody be present now. But most white-collar labor can be at least somewhat asynchronous. We send emails and chats that don’t require an immediate response. We edit and share documents without the expectation that our colleagues will attend to our work in a matter of milliseconds. Good remote managers should be time ninjas, continually deciding what work must be synchronous (meetings) and what work can be asynchronous (emails or shared docs).

Our late-night mini workdays are not just an expression of benign flexibility. They’re also the consequence of inflexible managers filling the day with so many meetings that we have to add a “worknight” to do our job.