I am a little conflicted about this. Seems like the author is trying to justify time spent in meetings which serve little purpose at first glance. I would say that is besides the purpose, and justifies busy work. They do not have enough real work to do, so need the meetings to feel useful and not bored.
I have very little respect for this. Maybe that is because I pretty much spend all my day (more than 8 hours) in a continuous block of meetings, and every bit of time is precious. Now sure some of them are inefficient and could be better managed, and yes a 20 minute discussion often expands to fill the fully scheduled 30 min block of time (more and more however we are saying letâ(TM)s end early and get some time back). But I would say the totally useless meetings where I go âoewhy the hell am I hereâ are pretty infrequent, and even there I can just fire up my laptop and tune things out, keeping an ear open.
Some context: The title does not matter, but I am a manager-of-managers and do virtually no hands-on work anymore; I have about 50 people plus 10 to 15 contractors rolling up to me. It takes a lot of coordination and planning to keep our projects aligned together with interdependencies figured out and tracked, and with activities outside of my area but within my larger group, etc. A lot of time is spent in mundane but critical activities like budget planning, resource allocation, HR matters (people conflicts, etc), 1:1 check-ins with my directs (who themselves are line managers).
A lot of time is spent managing sideways and upwards, handling the politics and shielding my team from the corporate sh*t. Someone has to deal with it, otherwise it will flow down. Our (very large 70,000 employee multi-national) company has a very consensus driven culture (given the different countries, cultures and people who work here), and often coordination with a lot of stakeholders is required to get things moving, or on track.
I also make time to do (periodic but not frequent) skip level meetings and check in either 1:1 or in groups with people in my team. Could be a chat, discussion about career progression, or once a quarter a particular project team might present an update on their work to me, and do a deep dive allowing me to poke and prod, and learn. Not only does it keep me plugged in with my team, but they appreciate the opportunity to present, and get time with their bosses boss, or higher. I really enjoy these.
Also there is the regular hiring activity, particularly in a growth phase, and OMG does hiring take time. Interviewing, as well as job requisition negotiations, budgets, time with HR, etc. Sometimes with regular attrition, a team might end up reporting directly to me while I search for their new leader, and that increases my workload and meetings.
Often times new, large multi-million dollar initiatives, do not just get kicked off in one meeting, a bunch of meetings, or even half/full/multi-day workshops are required to figure things out, align different groups, plan, etc, and then get it really moving.
And then, while I do not normally micromanage and instead delegate to the team leads who report into me, there is sometimes a crisis, or a project is very behind schedule, or someone else in the company is pissed with one of my teams, or something, and for a few days or weeks I have to dive deeper and engage with a particular project team on a more intense and frequent level until the problem gets sorted out. That adds meetings.
For all these reasons, and more, I spend all my working day in meetings. My situation may be very different from the one presented, but I have no patience for truly useless or waste-of-time meetings. If I find myself in one, I try to excuse myself after some time. I do not entertain future meeting requests from those people. If I found out someone in my org was spending time in meetings like this, that would get focused on pretty quickly, and I would ask their line manager if the person was using their time effectively. We have a lot of work to do with a backlog of tasks, and do not have a lot of bandwidth that is just free.