It’s a situation we’re all familiar with at work. Someone has a problem, question or is confused about a PDF or Excel spreadsheet. Wires have been crossed or there’s a need to ‘circle back’ and ‘synergise’. “Let’s have a call about it,” your colleague says. “Perfect,” you reply, hoping for a quick chat over the phone. Instead, a Zoom invite pops up in your inbox.

“Had a look at your calendar and saw you had space at 11.15am tomorrow morning,” the accompanying email reads. “Talk then.” And so another video call joins all the other video calls in your diary. Your schedule is now packed, and you know you’ll be spending the rest of the day catching up on the work you could have been doing while you were in Zoom meetings.

Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence in post-pandemic working life. Before Covid-19 ripped through our lives, we were all accustomed to in-person meetings that didn’t need to be meetings at all – a trip to the next desk or an email would have sufficed. Now, those meetings have gone digital.

One study carried out in 2022 found a 60% increase in remote meetings per employee, ballooning from an average of five weekly meetings per employee to eight – what you might call ‘meeting inflation’. And just like economic inflation is eating into our financial budgets, meeting inflation has a significant impact on our time and productivity levels.

Is your work schedule suffering from ‘meeting inflation’? Here’s how to fix it