Why are meetings so stoopid?

About this episode

The episode explores the inefficiencies of workplace meetings and their impact on business productivity.

The Meeting Will Continue Until Morale Improves. We've all been there — the meeting that could have been an email, the 90-minute "alignment call" that aligned precisely nothing, and the induction session that somehow ended in a group sing-along to Lifted by the Lighthouse Family. Yes, really. In this episode, Rakhee and Heather take a long, hard (and deeply cathartic) look at the workplace meeting — why so many of them are pointless, what they're actually costing businesses, and why the people most addicted to them are often the ones least qualified to run them. They dig into the data from a 2024 German four-day week pilot — where meetings dropped by 60% — and ask why it takes losing a fifth of your working week before anyone questions whether a recurring Tuesday stand-up is actually achieving anything. Spoiler: it isn't. Along the way, there's a corporate rebrand song with a key change, a 30-person pitch meeting that devolved into the Eurovision Song Contest, and some genuinely useful research on why large meetings make everyone less accountable and more exhausted. Plus: what Amazon, Shopify, and GitLab are doing differently — and why calendar bankruptcy might be the workplace…

People in this episode

Hosts: Rakhee, Heather

Topics covered

• workplace meetings
• meeting effectiveness
• business productivity
• corporate culture
• time management

Keywords

• meetings
• business
• productivity
• ineffective meetings
• corporate culture
• time management
• morale
• calendar bankruptcy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Amazon, Shopify, GitLab

Books & works: Lifted, Eurovision Song Contest

More episodes of Brenda You’re on Mute - The Podcast

• Everything You Wanted to Know About AI But Were Too Afraid to Ask: Interview with AI guru, Katherine Mora · May 12, 2026 · 45 min
• Professionalism? More like, Oppressionalism · March 31, 2026 · 52 min
• Davos, Davos...who the f*** is Davos? · February 16, 2026 · 47 min
• BYOM Review of the Year · January 13, 2026 · 44 min
• Message Like Mamdani – Lessons for Business from New York’s Mayor-Elect · December 15, 2025 · 35 min
• Maybe everyone in here wants to sleep with you, but do you know anything about SEO? Interview with Lisa Paasche - former CEO of Verve Search · December 14, 2025 · 47 min