I dislike meetings. There, it is said. I do not dislike them merely because I am a serious introvert — though that undoubtedly plays a part. I dislike them because, in my experience, most meetings achieve far less than the time they consume. Over thirty years in academia — including time in senior university leadership — I have attended more meetings than I care to count. Many were necessary. Some were useful. A small minority were transformative. Most were neither.
The Anatomy of a University Meeting
In my experience, university meetings tend to conflate three distinct functions:
- Human touchpoint — connection, visibility, and reassurance.
- Information cascade — updates, monitoring, and reporting.
- Decision-making — genuine strategic choice.
These functions require very different structures. Yet they are typically bundled together in a single, sprawling agenda. The result is predictable:
The touchpoint happens.
The information is cascaded.
Very few real decisions are made.
Why? Because most meaningful decisions are made elsewhere. Having once been part of senior decision-making groups, I know that many strategic choices are formed in small executive circles. Wider consultation often refines implementation, but rarely alters direction fundamentally. That is not cynicism; it is structural reality in large organisations. This creates a peculiar theatre of participation. Debate occurs, but the decision trajectory is often already set.
The Cost to Research Time
For research-active academics, the cost of meeting culture is not merely irritation — it is momentum. Meetings fragment days. They interrupt writing flow. They impose cognitive switching costs that linger long after the agenda closes. And they crowd out the deep, uninterrupted work that universities publicly claim to value. Time is rarely lost in dramatic blocks. It is eroded in increments.
An hour meeting rarely consumes only an hour. It requires preparation, context-switching and recovery. For introverts in particular, that recovery is not trivial. Energy expended in performative engagement is energy not available for analysis, synthesis or writing. Multiply that across a week.
One of the unexpected lessons of the Covid lockdowns was how elastic meeting time actually is. When meetings moved online, several things changed. Travel disappeared — even crossing campus can add hidden cost. Agendas were often tighter. Participants were more conscious of the clock. Some discussions became more focused; others were shorter because digital fatigue discouraged digression. Yes, people sometimes muted cameras and worked in parallel. That is not ideal engagement — but it revealed something important. It showed that not every agenda item required full synchronous attention. Some information cascade could easily have been handled asynchronously.
The return to default face-to-face meetings largely reinstated the old time costs without fully interrogating what we had learned. Covid was not a productivity utopia — far from it. But it exposed how much of our collective time is structured by habit rather than necessity. For a Time Shaper, the lesson is not “avoid meetings.” It is this: Interrogate them. Ask what must be synchronous. Protect what requires depth. Recognise that collective time is as finite as personal time.
Because if momentum is the currency of research, then the quiet erosion of hours through unexamined structure is one of its greatest threats.
The Psychology of Meetings
Some colleagues genuinely enjoy meetings. They are energised by interaction. They value informal exchange and that is a legitimate view. But meetings can also serve as social theatre — visibility, signalling, subtle positioning. One colleague once described meetings as a welcome opportunity to “get out of the office and catch up on gossip.” I remember being quietly appalled. I want to be in my office analysing, writing, constructing arguments. Not because I am antisocial, but because I am a researcher at heart. Meetings often reward extroversion and verbal fluency. Writing rewards reflection and structure. Academia needs both — but our time allocation often privileges the former.
Decision-Making and the Myth of Consultation
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink argues that many decisions are made rapidly, almost instinctively, and only later rationalised. My mother expressed the same idea more simply: “You make a decision in an instant and then spend years second-guessing it.”
In universities, strategic decisions frequently originate in small executive groups. Broader consultation follows — sometimes sincerely, sometimes performatively. True reversals are rare. In my career, I recall only one Vice-Chancellor publicly changing course in response to sustained academic opposition. [For those that want to know: Sir Paul Curran, Bournemouth University]. It was a defining moment of collegiate leadership precisely because it was unusual. Most meetings are not arenas of genuine decision. They are stages of endorsement, refinement or reporting. Recognising this distinction matters.
Can Meetings Be Better?
There are practices worth considering.
- Concise written papers rather than slide decks.
- Silent reading time at the start of meetings to ensure shared understanding.
- Clear identification of actual decision points.
- Standing meetings to enforce brevity; no phones, tablets or laptops.
- Separation of information updates – done by papers – from decision sessions.
During my time as Pro Vice-Chancellor, we experimented with a research blog to handle information cascade — reducing reliance on meeting time for updates. It worked well. What I failed to do, in hindsight, was reduce meeting hours proportionately. Structural change requires courage. The default to “let’s have a meeting” is rarely questioned because email bulletins are often ignored. Meetings become the blunt instrument of organisational attention. But blunt instruments are inefficient.
The Researcher’s Dilemma
If research is vocation, meetings can feel like interruption rather than contribution. And yet universities are communities. They require governance, coordination and shared oversight. The problem is not meetings per se. The problem is unexamined meetings. If we accept that time is our most finite resource, then collective time deserves as much scrutiny as grant income or citation metrics. Before convening a meeting, three questions might be asked:
- Is this genuinely a decision point?
- Can the information be communicated asynchronously?
- Who truly needs to be present?
The discipline of subtraction applies here as much as anywhere in time shaping.
A Final Appeal
If you are early in your academic career learn from our excess.
Value deep work.
Question default meetings.
Respect collective time.
Meetings should serve scholarship, not displace it.
If we are serious about protecting research time, we must be equally serious about interrogating how we spend shared hours. Because time lost to drift is one thing. Time lost by design is another.
(C) Matthew Bennett, 2026.
