Thoughts on meeting fatigue, because I have thoughts again

I was staring at the wall. My mind was blankish. I say blankish because there was still this nagging feeling that I had forgotten something. That there was something left to do.

This was not simply resting, it was more light disassociation. If disassociation could ever be light. My brain had quietly opted out. I was anxious about all the things I should be doing, aware of time passing, but unable to pick anything up. No book. No article. No email. Just… nothing.

This had happened previously in times of stress and to different degrees in my career, but over the past 8 years it became more frequent. 8 years ago is when I first became truly and fully full time remote.

I hadn’t reflect on the tool this was taking until it wasn’t there anymore.

My brain was calm. The calmest it has been in years.

What happened?

The longest break from a full-time meeting load that I have had in the past 8 years. Previously I had a couple weeks between roles, the shutdown may organizations do at the end of the year and vacations.

For the first time in 8 years I wasn’t in 10-20 hours of meetings a week. And it had been that way for an entire month.

My brain no longer seems to need to power down.

Then I noticed other things. My doom scrolling dropped. I stopped keeping a million browser tabs open “to read later.” I could sit with complicated texts again. I could read a book. I could have a call and remain present the entire time.

What I’d taken for personal fatigue started to look a lot more like cognitive recovery. ## Good intentions can create too much work

I’ve spent the past 15 years in mission-driven organizations. The mission is what brings people in and the mission can be what burns people out. These are places full of people who care deeply, want to make an impact and are deeply motivated.

They are also places that almost always try to do too much at once.

When there is too much work in progress things slowly shift. Priorities become less clear, people can’t estimate their work because of the overhead of context switching, many people fit one more thing in which then creates additional work for others.

Nobody can estimate anything, especially true outside of sold engineering processes and in work areas where agile style process is not the norm. People quietly compensate mostly by working longer.

Deadlines start to slip.

Enter the meetings

Meetings creep in as a solution.

Not because people love meetings, but because meetings are one of the fastest ways to push work forward when the system is overloaded. A meeting creates a deadline. It creates social accountability. It reassures us that something is moving, even if nothing has actually been decided.

Over time, meetings stop being about alignment or understanding. They become coordination mechanisms: reviewing to-do lists, checking progress, nudging things along. Connection the hardest part of remote work weakens. Nobody has time to connect because they need the time back to get their work done. The slower work of understanding how people are doing, where they’re stuck, or how the system is really functioning gets rushed or skipped entirely.

Everyone means well. Everyone is trying to help. And everyone gets tired.

Multitasking as a Symptom, Not a Moral Failure

One thing that often gets blamed in this environment is multitasking.

People check Slack during meetings. They skim email. They half-listen while juggling other work. This is usually framed as a lack of discipline or engagement.

I think it’s more useful to see it as a predictable response to overload.

When people have too many meetings, each individual meeting feels lower-stakes. Attention fragments because the brain is already stretched thin. Staying fully present for hours of back-to-back calls becomes unrealistic, so people hedge: they keep one eye on other work, just in case.

What I’ve noticed in the absence of constant meetings is the opposite effect. When meetings are rare, purposeful, and clearly defined, it’s much easier to give them full attention. I’m less likely to check Slack. Less likely to glance at email. Less likely to keep a second task running “just in case.”

Focus isn’t just a personal choice. It becomes a property of the system.

If we want people to be present, empathetic, and engaged, we have to design environments where that level of attention is actually sustainable.

There is a cognitive cost we don’t talk about

The exhaustion isn’t just about time. It’s cognitive.

For me, too many meetings show up as attention dropping out in short bursts. There are ten or twenty seconds where I’m gone, then scrambling to catch back up. Memory gets unreliable. Empathy gets harder. It becomes difficult to appear engaged, not because I don’t care, but because my brain can’t keep up.

When someone is going through something hard, that loss of presence matters.

I don’t think this is a personal failing, and I don’t think individuals are responsible for protecting their capacity through sheer willpower. Tools like transcription help, they let me focus on listening and asking questions rather than trying to remember everything, but they’re coping mechanisms, not cures.

What’s actually happening is that we’re asking meetings to compensate for system design problems: too much work in progress, unclear ownership, missing artifacts, and insufficient shaping of work before it fans out to many people.

Redesign the system, not the calendar

If meetings are where work goes when the system can’t hold it elsewhere, then reducing meetings starts upstream.

It starts with being explicit about work in progress. About how many initiatives are truly active. About what is sequenced versus what is simultaneous. About who is shaping the work, not just executing it.

It means treating artifacts: written plans, decisions, estimates, documents, as load-bearing structures not overhead. When people say they don’t have time to write, what they often mean is that the system already has too much work in motion.

It also means being more precise about what we call a meeting. Not every video call is a meeting. Sometimes it’s working together, like turning to a whiteboard in a shared office used to be. Sometimes it’s coordination. Sometimes it’s connection. Those are different things, and they deserve different designs.

Mission-driven organizations will probably always want to do more than they can comfortably sustain. The question is whether we design systems that absorb that pressure by consuming people’s cognitive and emotional capacity or whether we slow down just enough to let the work, and the people doing it, stay intact.

Staring at the wall wasn’t a failure of motivation. It was a signal. A message about how we work.

Focus isn’t something you demand from people. It’s something you make possible.

-Kate

P.S. Have you experienced being in this cycle? Tell me about it.

P.P.S. Have you experienced an organization that successful broke out of it? I would love to hear more!