There is a principle in organizational behaviour that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Meetings follow the same rule. A meeting scheduled for sixty minutes will take sixty minutes, regardless of whether sixty minutes of content exists.
Why meetings inflate
The default slot problem. Calendar tools offer thirty and sixty-minute defaults. Nobody asks "how long does this actually need to be?" They pick the nearest default. A fifteen-minute conversation becomes a thirty-minute meeting. A forty-minute discussion becomes an hour.
The padding instinct. Organizers add buffer time because they are worried about running out of time. The buffer gets filled. The meeting runs to the end of the buffer. Next time, more buffer is added.
The social pressure to fill time. Ending a meeting early feels awkward. Someone always has "one more thing." The one more thing takes ten minutes. The meeting runs over.
The cost of inflation
A meeting that should take twenty minutes but is scheduled for sixty costs each attendee forty minutes of unnecessary time. In a ten-person meeting, that is four hundred minutes — nearly seven hours — of collective time that could have been used for actual work.
Multiply this across a week of inflated meetings and the number becomes significant.
How to deflate
- Schedule for the content, not the slot. If the meeting needs twenty minutes, schedule twenty minutes. If it needs forty-five, schedule forty-five.
- State the end condition, not the end time. "This meeting ends when we've decided X" is more effective than "this meeting ends at 2pm."
- End early without apology. "We've covered everything — let's give everyone the time back" is a gift, not a failure.
- Resist the one more thing. If something new comes up at the end of a meeting, schedule it separately rather than extending the current one.
The experiment: Schedule your next meeting for fifteen minutes less than you normally would. See what happens. Most people find the meeting ends at the same point it would have anyway — just without the padding.