Advice posts/columns recommending fewer meetings often tend to emphasize the importance of saying no, mandating quiet hours, and using asynchronous channels to minimize meetings.
While these are helpful as short term band-aids, they do little in the long term because they don’t solve for the root cause – a lack of clarity within the working team.
The most effective long term solution I’ve found is to learn to write better documents, build better spreadsheets, and create crisper slides.
One clear and concise doc or slide deck typically saves 100+ hours (sometimes even 1000+ hours) of meeting time.
