I think there is a strange transition to filling days with recurring meetings in many tech/start-up companies - 1-on-1, stand-up meetings, weekly meeting with d

I think there is a strange transition to filling days with recurring meetings in many tech/start-up companies - 1-on-1, stand-up meetings, weekly meeting with different subset of the same group of people etc. My direct report had about 15 people under him, so this was 15 hours a week on 1-on-1 meetings (he sat beside me by the way). Most of these I found to be incredibly ineffective. Rather than making decisions and getting things done, many tasks were delegated to different meetings and non-trivial amount of effort was spent on keeping track of just what was discussed. This sort of 'meta-work' quickly grows to become unmanageable and any task that requires even the smallest of approval becomes an enormous exercise in bureaucracy.