Why you should stop scheduling the default 1-hour meeting
There is a better way. I spent three years working with Sherpany — a company dedicated to making meetings more effective for C-level executives and board members. If there’s one thing I took with me from that experience, it’s this: Most 1-hour meetings are unnecessary, unproductive, and defaulted out of habit — not need.
This post unpacks:
Why the 60-minute default exists (and why it fails)
How top leaders keep meetings short and effective
Three ways to challenge the default and run leaner, smarter meetings. Break the cycle. Reclaim your time.
Most default 1-hour meetings are broken
In fact most meetings in general are. Not because meetings are bad. They’re essential. But because we treat them like default rituals instead of strategic tools.
Why 1-hour meetings became the default
Somewhere along the way, "1 hour" became the standard calendar block. We book meetings like it’s nothing — until we look up and wonder where the day went.
No clear agenda.
No prep.
Resulting in no real discussions and reflection.
Most importantly: no real outcomes.
Just an invite, a Zoom link, and a creeping sense of burnout. Of barely having time to reset our brain after one discussion before jumping into the next. No time to think. No time to pee.
Recognize yourself? Yeah — same. Or at least that was before I started refusing the meeting madness in my daily work life.
Meetingitis is real
The problem with default-length meetings
It’s that low-grade organizational fever. You feel it in teams that spend more time talking about work than actually doing it.
It shows up as slow decision-making. Calendar fatigue. Low energy. And it gets worse the more senior you get — because everyone wants your time, and saying yes is easier than fixing the system.
But here’s the thing: the most effective leaders don’t default to 1-hour meetings. Many don’t even do 30.
What high-performers do differently
Elon Musk is known for 5-minute meetings and leaving (or ending) discussions the moment they stop being useful.
Barack Obama kept briefings tight — 15 minutes, tops, and only what was essential.
Sheryl Sandberg would often start meetings with: “What are the three things we need to decide?” — and wrap it up early.
Richard Branson prefers standing meetings and walking catch-ups. Short. Purposeful. Done.
If these people, running nations and global companies, can keep things short — so can we.
3 ways to run better meetings
1. Challenge the default
Why is this a meeting? What are we trying to achieve? Could it be an email? A Loom recording? A Slack thread? Challenge your meetings and the calendar overload. Believe me, this is healthy conflict. It’s time management.
If it has to be a meeting:
Is it a 15-min alignment?
A 30-min decision point?
A quick unblock?
Rarely do we need the full hour. We just use it because it's there.
2. Think cost, not just time
A default 1-hour meeting with 5 people? That’s 5 hours of collective time. Time that could’ve gone to strategy, sales, product, thinking.
Add context-switching, energy drain, and recovery time, and the true cost is even higher.
Meetings should be expensive — in value, not in waste.
3. Prep is everything for meeting productivity
The best meetings I’ve been part of (or helped clients design) had one thing in common: preparation.
An agenda. Pre-reads. Clear roles. A decision to be made. No surprises, no winging it, no wasted minutes.
That’s a big part of what Sherpany taught me — and I’ve embedded that thinking into how I work today.
I’m not anti-meeting. I’m anti-default. Because defaults are where dysfunction hides.
Meetings can be powerful. They can align, clarify, energize. But only if we design them to do so.
So next time you reach for that “1h” slot in Google Calendar, ask yourself: Do I really need an hour — or just a better habit?
Hinoki Digital
I help businesses streamline their marketing and operations — including meetings. Leaner workflows, sharper focus, better outcomes.
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