When I was a lead before retiring last year, I went to all the meetings instead of my team, but always kept them in the loop via Slack as to what was important

When I was a lead before retiring last year, I went to all the meetings instead of my team, but always kept them in the loop via Slack as to what was important during the meeting. I also wrote as much code as they did so was always understanding how the meeting decisions might relate to our codebase and future efforts. Of course it added a lot of extra hours to my workweek doing both, but I never had much issue over my career multitasking. It's not easy or fun sitting in too many meetings though as I always asked a lot of questions to ensure product/design/execs could adequately explain what they were asking for; asking enough questions like this made sure we didn't waste too much time doing things that were likely to change. Meetings can be useful if you participation helps the workload; but it can drag down you and your team's productivity if it does nothing but waste time. Often people whose entire life is going to meetings don't understand how they can affect success simply by sucking up huge hours every day.