The Meeting is a survival game set in the one place productivity goes to die: a status meeting that could have been an email. Someone is sharing their screen. Someone else joined late and wants a recap. Your goal is to make it to the end with your sanity, and maybe your afternoon, intact.
Underneath the comedy is a real workplace problem: meeting overload. Calendars fill with recurring syncs and "just to align" calls that could often be a short written update, and the true cost isn't only the time in the room — it's the fragmented day around it, where focused work gets chopped into unusable slivers between calls. Every meeting also has an invisible price tag: the combined hourly cost of everyone sitting in it.
The genuinely useful skill the game gestures at is boundary-setting: declining meetings without a clear purpose or agenda, suggesting an async update instead, timeboxing the ones that must happen, and deliberately defending blocks of uninterrupted focus time. Saying no to a low-value meeting is not slacking; it's protecting the deep work that actually moves things forward.
It's shorthand for meetings that only share information one way. If there's no real discussion or decision needed, a written update usually does the job faster.
Ask for the agenda and the decision it needs, offer to contribute async, or suggest a shorter slot. Framing it around outcomes makes a no feel constructive.
Beyond the hours spent, meetings fragment the day and interrupt focus. The scattered time between calls is often too short for meaningful deep work.
Protected, uninterrupted blocks for concentrated work. Guarding a few of these each week is one of the most effective defenses against calendar creep.
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