The blue light from the 29-inch monitor is doing something weird to my retinas, a rhythmic pulsing that matches the ticking of the clock on the wall, even though that clock is purely decorative and hasn’t moved since 2019. I am currently the nineteenth person on a call that was supposed to last 29 minutes. We are currently at minute 39. The host, whose name I have already forgotten despite it being plastered in 12-point sans-serif font at the bottom of his square, is sharing his screen. It’s a vista of Outlook blocks, a digital Tetris game where every piece is a jagged L-shape of ‘sync-ups’ and ‘touch-bases.’ We are here, all nineteen of us, for the express purpose of finding a time to talk about the thing we were supposed to talk about today.
We pretend this is about logistics. We tell ourselves that coordination is the engine of the modern enterprise. It isn’t. This 30-minute ritual of scheduling the one-hour ritual is a sophisticated defense mechanism designed to ensure that no single human being ever has to take the fall for a decision. If we all agree to meet, and in that meeting, we all agree to a direction, then failure is a distributed load. It’s like those old-timey firing squads where one person has a blank-except in corporate life, everyone has a blank, and the target eventually just dies of boredom.
The Dignity of Accountability
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I remember working with Luca S.-J., a food stylist who could spend 49 minutes positioning a single sesame seed on a brioche bun with a pair of surgical tweezers. Luca didn’t have meetings. Luca had ‘the light.’ When the light was right, you worked. When it wasn’t, you prepped. There was a brutal honesty to the tweezers. If the burger looked like a car wreck, it was Luca’s fault. He couldn’t call a ‘pre-styling alignment’ to shift the blame to the lettuce procurement team. There is a certain dignity in that kind of singular accountability that has been completely bled out of our synchronized calendar invites.
Sometimes I think we schedule these things because we are terrified of the silence that comes with actually having to produce something. If my calendar is full, I am important. If my calendar is a mosaic of overlapping 59-minute blocks, I am essential. It’s a visual representation of a busy-ness that masks a profound lack of direction. We are navigating by committee, which is a lot like trying to steer a ship by having everyone on board grab a different part of the hull and push in the direction they think is North.
The calendar is not the work; the calendar is the avoidance of the work.
Core Insight
I once saw a project manager spend 199 minutes over the course of a week just sending ‘ping’ messages to see if people were available for a ‘quick huddle.’ By the time the huddle happened, the original problem had either solved itself through sheer luck or had mutated into a catastrophic failure that required a different, larger meeting. We are obsessed with the ‘how’ of working-the tools, the Slack channels, the Trello boards-to the point where we’ve forgotten the ‘what.’
The Iterative Loop of Inaction
199 Minutes Spent
Sending ‘ping’ messages for availability.
Searching for consensus.
The Huddle
Problem mutated or solved itself by luck.
Next Action
Schedule a larger meeting to discuss the failure of the huddle.
It reminds me of the way some manufacturing firms handle their floor logic. If you have a bottleneck at the assembly line, you don’t call a meeting to discuss the philosophy of the bottleneck. You clear the damn line. In high-stakes environments like those supported by LANDO, the focus is on the integrity of the output, not the volume of the discussion. If the design is inefficient, the product fails. There is no room for a 30-minute sync to decide which screw to turn. You turn the screw, or you don’t. The physical world doesn’t care about your ‘circle back’ culture.
I find myself staring at a small smudge on my screen, right over Thursday’s 10:00 AM slot. I try to scratch it off with my fingernail, but it’s stubborn. It’s a metaphor, probably. Or just a bit of dried sauce from the celebratory wrap I ate after the parallel parking triumph. I think about Luca S.-J. again. He once told me that the secret to a perfect food shot wasn’t the camera or the lighting, but knowing exactly when to stop touching the food. Over-handling is the death of beauty. The same applies to projects. We over-handle them with our meetings, our feedback loops, and our ‘just checking in’ emails until the original idea is a grey, lukewarm mush of compromise.
The Exhaustion of Performance
Decisions Made: Zero
Of Meeting is Performative
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from a day of back-to-back calls where nothing was decided but everyone felt ‘heard.’ It’s a cognitive drain that no amount of expensive coffee can fix. You end the day with 49 unread emails and a sense of existential dread, knowing that you have to wake up and do it all again tomorrow. Why do we do this? Because to stop would mean acknowledging that 89 percent of what we do in those meetings is performative. We are actors in a play called ‘The Productive Professional,’ and the script is written in real-time by a collective of people who are all equally afraid of being the one to say, ‘We don’t need to talk about this. Just go do it.’
20:1
I once made a mistake-a real, tangible one. I scheduled a 30-minute call to discuss the font size on a deck because I didn’t want to be the one responsible if the CEO thought it was too small. I wasted 19 minutes of six people’s lives because I was a coward. I didn’t admit that at the time, of course. I phrased it as ‘ensuring stakeholder alignment.’ But the truth was that I wanted a shield. I wanted to be able to say, ‘Well, we all agreed on 12-point Calibri,’ if things went south. We are building cathedrals of bureaucracy to house our insecurities.
The Silence of Autonomy
Responsibility cannot be divided; it can only be abandoned.
The Central Truth
I’ve started doing this thing lately where I just… don’t go. If an invite arrives without an agenda, or if the attendee list looks like a small wedding, I decline. The first time I did it, I felt a surge of adrenaline, the same kind you get when you’re driving slightly too fast on a curved road. I expected a reprimand. I expected someone to call me out. Instead? Nothing. The meeting happened without me. Decisions (or the lack thereof) were made. The world kept spinning at its usual 1,039 miles per hour at the equator. It turns out that a lot of the ‘essential’ conversations we have are just white noise we use to fill the vacuum of our own autonomy.
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In the styling world, if you don’t show up with your kit, the shoot stops. There is no ‘syncing’ your way out of a missing prop. This binary nature of work-either it is done or it is not-is something we should strive to re-import into the digital workspace. We should treat our time as a finite material, like gold or high-grade steel, rather than an infinite resource that can be sliced into 15-minute increments until there’s nothing left but crumbs.
I look back at the screen. The nineteen people are finally settling on a time. It’s next Tuesday at 9:09 AM. I look at my own calendar. I have a 29-minute gap right before it. I could use that time to actually draft the proposal we’re supposed to discuss. Or, more likely, I’ll spend those 29 minutes staring at the wall, recovery from the ‘pre-alignment’ call, wondering if Luca S.-J. ever feels this hollow when he’s tweezers-deep in a turkey club sandwich.
The Beige Outcome
We are so busy trying to avoid the possibility of being wrong that we’ve eliminated the possibility of being right in any meaningful way. A committee-approved ‘right’ is always a safe, boring, average ‘right.’ It’s the color beige in human form. It’s a 59-page report that says exactly what everyone already knew but in a way that sounds expensive.
As I finally click ‘Leave Meeting,’ the silence in my room is deafening. The sun has shifted. It’s now hitting the floor at a 49-degree angle, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. They don’t have a schedule. They don’t have a sync-up. They just exist, moving in response to the actual forces of the world, rather than the perceived pressures of a shared Outlook calendar. I close my laptop. It’s time to do some actual work, or at least, to stop pretending that talking about work is the same thing as doing it. The next time someone asks for 30 minutes to schedule 60, I think I’ll just tell them I’m busy parallel parking. It’s a much better use of the space.
