Yeah, no, we secretly don't. One of these articles pops up every now and then talking about all these supposed social benefits of meetings, but that fundamenta

Yeah, no, we secretly don't. One of these articles pops up every now and then talking about all these supposed social benefits of meetings, but that fundamentally has not been my experience with meetings. As many people have pointed out, a good many meetings could simply be replaced by a decent email. In my experience, the only people who seem to "get" something more than the pure nominal reasons that the meetings were called for are managers who really like talking about themselves. I worked for a distributed team for a large company [1] in the past, where about 10% of the team was in NYC (where I was located), about 70% of the team was in California, and the remainder were in Singapore. The team leader had the astonishingly brilliant idea to hold meetings at 8:30pm NYC time, because that was the time that "worked best for everyone". This was bad, but one could argue it was necessary if the meetings were necessary. However, this genius thought it would be a good idea to routinely spend the first fifteen minutes blathering on about his opinions on various tech non-work-related things, or his kids, or some other such nonsense in most other meetings, and the rest of the meeting could be, you guessed it, summarized in an email. You know what I would "love" a lot more than having intimate conversations with my coworkers? Spending time with my wife, or my friends, or doing nearly anything else. [1] No doubt that you can find out which large company I'm talking about given my work history, but I politely ask that you don't post it here directly.