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Bartleby: Your best meeting ever

2026-02-16 · 14:21 UTC ·Andrew Palmer at The Economist ·6 min read

Brief

Andrew Palmer’s Bartleby column revisits a perennial office problem: meeting overload. Using a 2024 Atlassian survey of 5,000 white-collar employees, he notes that four in five workers feel meetings crowd out real work and could be cut to half their current length. He uses Rebecca Hinds’s book “Your Best Meeting Ever” as a framework for practical reforms, including pruning recurring calendar holds, gathering structured feedback through short polls, defining participant roles more explicitly, and writing agenda items as action-oriented verb-noun decisions instead of vague labels like “catch-up.” He also points to DBS’s “joyful observer” role as an example of lightweight process discipline. Palmer broadly agrees with the anti-meeting critique, but adds nuance: people often signal more dislike of meetings in public than in private, exclusion from meetings can feel worse than attendance, and some gatherings exist to build trust and culture rather than maximize throughput. He is skeptical of excessive AI mediation in meetings if it substitutes for human presence rather than improving execution.

Why it matters

Andrew Palmer’s February 16, 2026 Bartleby column argues that bad meetings remain a major productivity drain, while endorsing Rebecca Hinds’s new management advice on making them more useful.

Key details

  • Palmer cites a 2024 Atlassian survey of 5,000 white-collar workers in which 80% said they attend so many meetings that they struggle to get work done, and the same 80% said those meetings could be completed in half the time.
  • Rebecca Hinds, a researcher at enterprise-AI firm Glean and author of “Your Best Meeting Ever,” recommends regular “calendar cleanses” to remove recurring meetings, simple post-meeting feedback polls, clearer participant roles, and agendas written as verb-noun decisions such as “Approve Q3 marketing campaign.”
  • The column highlights specific operating practices, including DBS bank’s use of a “joyful observer” in meetings to provide end-of-meeting feedback, and norms that let employees decline or leave meetings when they are not adding value.
  • Palmer pushes back on reflexive meeting-bashing with three caveats: workers complain more publicly than privately about meetings, some meetings serve cultural and relationship-building purposes rather than pure efficiency, and AI support can help up to a point but “digital twins” attending in employees’ place would miss the social purpose of meetings.
Cleaned source text

title: Bartleby: Your best meeting ever

author: Andrew Palmer at The Economist

content_type: newsletter

publication: e.economist.com

published: 2026-02-16T08:21:43-06:00

source_url: gmail://19c66d67e82388e0

word_count: 1345

Also: The excruciating quest for a meeting room

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February 16th 2026 For subscribers

Bartleby

Your guide to the agonies of office life

Andrew Palmer

Bartleby columnist

Hello from London.

The very first Bartleby column I wrote was on how to run meetings better. The first season of Boss Class featured an episode on how to run meetings better. It’s possible neither of these efforts have solved the problem. A 2024 survey of 5,000 white-collar workers by Atlassian, a software firm, paints a fairly typical picture. Four out of five workers said they are expected to attend so many meetings that they struggle to get work done; the same proportion of respondents said that their get-togethers could be done in half the time.

Hence the market for a new book, “Your Best Meeting Ever” by Rebecca Hinds. Ms Hinds, who is a researcher at Glean, an enterprise-AI firm, conducts a nice whistle-stop tour of some sensible ideas for improving things:

Conduct regular calendar cleanses, purging diaries of recurring meetings and forcing people to think about which ones really need to be reinstated.

Institute feedback mechanisms to see whether meetings are working: she recommends a simple two-question poll, asking participants whether the meeting was worth their time and what would have improved it. DBS, a big South-East Asian bank, has a participant in its meetings play the role of a “joyful observer”, whose job it is to provide feedback at the end of a meeting.

Enable people to turn down meetings, or even walk out of them if they are not going to add value.

Turn agenda items into verb-noun combinations, like “Approve Q3 marketing campaign”, to ensure that they have a point. In one nice aside, Ms Hinds cites research suggesting that meetings with generic names like “catch-up” rank as the most useless of all.

Make sure that people’s roles are well-understood. That means assigning clear responsibility not just for action items but also for making sure the whole meeting does not go off-track.

I’m completely on board with all these ideas and more. There are far too many pointless, rambling meetings that sap productivity and morale. But in the interests of fairness, here are three arguments against mindless meeting-bashing.

First, people may say they hate meetings but they are inconsistent. Ms Hinds cites a study by Steven Rogelberg of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in which employees were asked to rate their meetings privately and publicly. Workers were much more likely to complain about them publicly. Saying you like meetings is a bit shameful, like admitting to liking Coldplay. And however much people dislike bad meetings, they dislike being excluded from them even more. It’s the workplace equivalent of the old joke about restaurants: the meetings are awful and so few people are invited.

Second, efficiency is not the only goal of a meeting. Sometimes people are getting together for cultural reasons or to build relationships. Sometimes it makes sense to have a slot in the calendar for a generic catch-up as a forcing mechanism for contact between busy colleagues. In her book Ms Hinds devotes several pages to the use of AI in meetings. Up to a certain threshold the technology can be useful. Once enough people are sending digital twins to meetings in their stead, the point of them has been royally missed.

Third, and most importantly, workplace columnists need to have things to write about. This week’s effort is a case in point: without meetings, there would be no excruciating quest to find a room in which to hold them.

That’s enough fairness. Ms Hinds’s book is tackling a genuine problem. Even if you really like ~~Coldpl~~ meetings, they can always be improved. So please send your meeting horror stories and your own advice on improving them to bartleby@economist.com, and I’ll feature the best answers in a forthcoming edition of this newsletter.

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