What do Apple discontinuing the iPod, Bill Murray waking up to the same morning in Groundhog Day, and a law firm owner sitting through the eighth weekly meeting that produced no decision have in common?
It is not that all three could have been fixed with better pastries. To be fair, pastries have kept more bad meetings alive than strategy ever did.
The shared problem is that the old pattern stopped moving anything forward. Progress required someone to admit it and change what happened next.
Law firms have meetings that outlive their purpose all the time. The invite keeps appearing, everyone keeps attending, and nobody wants to be the person who asks the dangerous question: What is the point of this meeting?
The Lie We Tell Ourselves
“It is already on the calendar, so it must be important.”
Recurring invites start to feel like legal precedent written in blue calendar boxes. Nobody remembers the original facts, but everybody is afraid to challenge the holding.
So eight people spend an hour sharing updates they could have read in five minutes. The meeting ends with “great discussion,” which is corporate for “nothing changed, but we were all present when it failed to change.”
Attendance is not value. A full screen of faces may mean commitment. It may also mean everyone has learned how to look thoughtful while answering email on another monitor.
The calendar is not a museum. You do not have to preserve every recurring meeting just because somebody once thought it was a good idea.
What Actually Needs to Change
Every meeting needs a job. Decide something. Assign something. Solve a blocker. Change a behavior.
If the job is only “share updates,” ask whether people need to be in the same room at the same time. Most adults can read. Some lawyers even do it recreationally.
And if the meeting is supposed to create a decision, name that decision before the meeting starts. “Discuss intake” is not an outcome. “Choose which intake calls receive a same-day lawyer review and assign the owner” is.
The Fellowship did not walk into Mordor for a general status update. There was a mission, an owner, and a pretty aggressive deadline. Your Tuesday management meeting can probably manage the same level of clarity without the giant spider.
The other shift is measuring what happened after the meeting. Notes are not proof. A beautifully formatted recap that changes nobody’s work is just fan fiction about productivity.
Data is not the meeting. Behavior change is the meeting.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
In our marketing meeting last week, Rachel brought up the book club. Nobody had attended the prior week’s session. She suggested we scratch the upcoming ones and reassess next year.
My response was basically, “You mean I do not have to spend a bunch of time rereading books and preparing for nobody to show up? I am all good.”
We could have protected the idea. We could have changed the time, added reminders, renamed it, built a survey, or held a meeting about why nobody wanted the other meeting. That last option is how recurring meetings reproduce in captivity.
Instead, we stopped.
That was not failure. The book club had a job: people show up, discuss the material, and get something useful from it. Nobody showed up. The result was not a personal insult. It was evidence that this version of the idea had not earned more calendar space.
Something can be thoughtful, well-intended, and no longer worth doing. The original idea does not get tenure.
How to Start Fixing It
1. Give every recurring meeting a one-sentence contract.
Write: By the end of this meeting, we will [make this decision], [assign this owner], or [remove this blocker].
If you cannot complete that sentence, cancel the next occurrence and send the update another way. Do not invite six people to watch you discover the agenda in real time.
Proof it worked: for the next four meetings, attendees can name the expected outcome before joining and the actual decision before leaving.
2. Track the action, not the attendance.
At the end, record only four things: decision, owner, deadline, and proof. Then review the proof at the next meeting.
If the same task rolls forward three times, the meeting is not creating accountability. It is Groundhog Day with a shared screen.
Proof it worked: at least 80 percent of assigned actions are completed, explicitly renegotiated, or intentionally killed by the next review. Nothing survives by becoming a quieter bullet point.
3. Put an expiration date on the invitation.
Every 90 days, make the owner renew the meeting by answering three questions: Did the right people attend? What decisions did we make? What behavior changed afterward?
Think Survivor for calendar invites. The meeting has to make its case at tribal council. “We have always done it” is not an immunity idol.
Proof it worked: every recurring meeting has a named owner, a review date, and a current reason to exist.
4. Choose keep, repair, or retire.
Keep it if it consistently creates useful decisions. Repair it if the purpose matters but the structure is broken. Retire it if nobody can show what would be lost.
If you repair it, change one thing for four occurrences: attendees, length, agenda, or frequency. Then measure again. Do not rebuild the whole process like a home-renovation show where one loose cabinet somehow becomes a missing roof.
Proof it worked: the repaired meeting produces better decisions with less total time. If it does not, let it go without creating a task force to study its feelings.
The Real Point
Meetings are not free. A one-hour meeting with eight people costs eight hours, plus preparation, recovery, and the work everybody did not do while listening to the same update.
Some meetings are worth every minute. They create clarity, decisions, accountability, and fewer surprises. Keep those.
The rest are calendar zombies. They keep shuffling into Tuesday because nobody has been willing to close the invite.
This week, audit your three longest-running recurring meetings. For each one, write the decision it exists to create and the behavior that should change afterward. If you cannot name both, cancel the next occurrence or repair the format.
Use the reclaimed hour for work that matters, dinner that stays warm, or absolutely nothing. “Nothing” is still a better outcome than another meeting that changes nothing.