At one time I was involved with 4 major programs of work and saw my whole week disappear in a patchwork of weekly scheduled meetings. My solution was to get re

At one time I was involved with 4 major programs of work and saw my whole week disappear in a patchwork of weekly scheduled meetings. My solution was to get really pushy with meeting organisers to (a) cut the default time from an hour to 30 minutes; (b) schedule them back-to-back (if not, I'd decline and ask them to be rescheduled); (c) merge similar meetings; (d) tell each program manager I'd attend max 1 weekly meeting and one monthly steering committee, and everything else would be async; (e) drop off any call that didn't have a clear agenda and deliverables. Before doing this, I told each of the programs' execs and dev leads what I was doing, making it clear it was the only way I could balance my roles as team lead, workstream lead and individual contributor. The other thing is to drop any feeling of guilt for dropping off calls that aren't productive.