This feels like an especially relevant conversation to have during the holidays, when many folks will be out of the office, so the number of meetings happening

This feels like an especially relevant conversation to have during the holidays, when many folks will be out of the office, so the number of meetings happening will be way down. I've consistently observed over the past few years that whenever a bunch of frequent-meeting-schedulers are simultaneously out of the office... everything is fine. Nothing bad happens. Team members coordinate with each other fine. Cross-team coordination happens fine. There are still meetings, but the ones that happen tend to be the ones that are actually important and needed. The fluff meetings that have way too many participants get cancelled because too many folks are out, and it becomes more obvious than ever that those meetings were never valuable in the first place. My productivity (as half-manager-half-programmer) goes way up. My stress and frustration go down because I'm not giving the same status report to the same set of people three times. I'm not against meetings in general, whether they be 1-1s or large group meetings. I think meetings are fundamental to many organizations. But I do think that almost every workplace has too many meetings that last too long on average and have too many participants on average. "Meeting culture" tends to act like a virus that infects various parts of the organization. Pure managers get addicted to scheduling and running meetings, because it's the most concrete way they can exercise their authority and appear productive, even if it's not actually productive or helpful to the organization.