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White-Collar Workers Drown in Meetings

Source: theatlantic.com

White-collar workers now spend far more time in meetings than in the past, crowding out actual work.
Meeting time has doubled since the 1960s, jumping from 19% to 38% of the workday for managers.
This shift harms productivity and employee satisfaction, as people feel swamped by coordination without enough time to think or create.

White-collar professionals are drowning in meetings that have proliferated over decades, especially since the pandemic. The article draws on time-use diaries from thousands of workers to show how this explosion leaves little room for focused work. It argues that endless coordination meetings are a symptom of bloated bureaucracies in modern offices. For readers in knowledge jobs, this explains the exhaustion from back-to-back Zooms and the frustration of never getting real work done.