Opinion: Meetings consume up to a third of the working week, but often leave us drained. Work futurist Dominic Price offers a practical way to decide which ones to kill, keep or tweak.
If you want a fast way to find wasted time in any organisation, open the calendar.
Look at the meetings. Standing meetings. Recurring meetings. Meetings about meetings. And a surprising number of meetings where no one can quite remember why they exist in the first place.
One of the simplest exercises I encourage teams to run is something I call “Kill, Keep or Tweak.” It is essentially organisational spring cleaning. You take the regular rhythms of work and hold them up to the light. Meetings, reports, approvals, rituals, check-ins. All the things that quietly fill our days, and deplete our mojo.
Then you ask three very simple questions.
Should we kill this entirely?
Should we tweak it because the intent is good but the execution is poor?
Or should we keep it exactly as it is because it genuinely adds value?
The great meeting abyss
Most teams find the result both liberating and slightly embarrassing. Whole blocks of time disappear once people realise the calendar is full of habits rather than deliberate choices.
Meetings are usually the biggest revelation.
The average knowledge worker now spends around 12 to 15 hours a week in meetings, roughly a third of the working week. Senior leaders often spend 50 to 70 per cent of their time in scheduled discussions.
That is a staggering amount of collective human energy.
And yet research consistently shows that over 70 per cent of meetings are considered unproductive.
People often laugh nervously when they realise half the meetings in their week exist simply because no one has ever been brave enough to cancel them.
And here is where things get a little absurd in the age of AI.
I regularly see organisations proudly demonstrating how their new AI tools can summarise meetings and automatically distribute minutes afterwards.
Which begs an obvious question. Why are we using AI to summarise and distribute the minutes of a meeting that should never have happened in the first place?
A meeting that stole everyone’s time. Drained their energy. And achieved very little.
That is the definition of modern workplace insanity. We are using powerful new technology to make bad habits more efficient instead of questioning whether those habits should exist at all.
Where AI fits in
After more than a decade examining how teams work, I have become convinced that conversations about AI cannot begin with the technology. They have to start with how work happens.
Because technology merely amplifies broken ways of working. There is an old phrase that captures this perfectly: A fool with a tool is still a fool. You have just made them faster.
If decision-making is slow and bureaucratic, AI will help you automate all 954 approvals.
If you produce a report nobody reads, AI will now make that prettier and longer, then share it with everyone.
The opposite is also true. When organisations have strong cultures of trust, autonomy and clarity, technology becomes an incredible amplifier for creativity and growth. These organisations have better signal and much less noise.
Which is why leaders need to see AI as a growth opportunity rather than simply a cost-cutting exercise.
Too many conversations about AI start with the same question. How many roles can we replace? How much cost can we remove?
That is the least interesting use of the technology.
A new model for work
I often describe the opportunity in three categories. Minus one, zero and plus one.
Minus one is about removing work that should never have existed in the first place. Think pointless reporting, duplicate admin or the weekly meeting that everyone secretly dreads.
Zero is the efficiency play. Doing the same work faster, cheaper or with fewer steps.
Plus one is where things get exciting. This is where AI allows us to create entirely new value that simply was not possible before.
Most organisations rush straight to zero. Efficiency feels safe and measurable.
But the real opportunity sits at minus one and plus one.
Use AI to eliminate the meaningless tasks that clog our calendars. Then use it to unlock new ideas, products and experiences that humans and machines can build together.
Protect the human resources
This is particularly important for Australia.
For decades, Australia’s economic story has been shaped by our natural resources. Iron ore, coal, gas. Entire regions and industries grew on the back of those booms.
But the next global resources boom will look different.
It will be human resources. Australia currently has a workforce of roughly 16 million people, with about 14.7 million employed across the economy.
That collective human capability is the most valuable asset we have.
If we combine it with technology intelligently, Australia can absolutely compete on the global stage. Not by trying to outscale the United States or out-manufacture China, but by unlocking the potential of our people.
And it starts with something deceptively simple.
Open the calendar.
Pick a meeting.
And ask a very honest question.
Should we kill it, keep it, or tweak it?
Dominic Price is a work futurist and Work AI Institute expert. He spent the past decade as a work futurist for Atlassian and has recently joined advisory firm Be Luminous as a partner.
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