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How to Make Meetings Less Terrible
A podcast episode on why so many meetings go badly, and the research on fixing them
Why it’s worth your time
This Freakonomics Radio episode pairs a meetings researcher with a professional facilitator, and between them they cover many of the ways an office meeting goes wrong and what to change. Stephen Dubner keeps it moving with listener horror stories and a detour into how African wild dogs decide to go hunting. Whether you run meetings or mostly sit in them, you'll likely come away with one change worth trying this week.
Running a meeting people don't dread
- Listen to the episode.
After the opening wild-dog story and the listener complaints, Steven Rogelberg and Priya Parker get to the basics: purpose, length and who to invite. Stay for the last few minutes, on how to end a meeting.
- Rewrite one agenda as questions.
Pick a recurring meeting. Replace each topic on its agenda with the question it needs to answer, then mark who has to be there for each question. If you don't run the meeting, suggest it to the person who does.
You“Could we try listing the questions we need answered at the top of the next agenda? It would help me come prepared.”
Good moments for this: before you send a meeting invitewhen a standing meeting feels staleon a commute
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Parker's test is whether anything would be different if the meeting didn't happen; a name like Monday staff meeting, in her words, is a category, not a purpose. Running one recurring meeting through that test can be revealing.
What might make this harder
Jen Sandler, one of the anthropologists in the episode, describes meetings held to make an already-made decision look collective. Ask ahead what the meeting is for, and if the decision is settled, ask where your input can still help.
Questions people ask
What is the Freakonomics episode on meetings about?
Stephen Dubner talks with organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg, facilitator Priya Parker and two anthropologists who study meetings about why so many meetings are unproductive, and what helps: a clear purpose, a chosen length, fewer people, healthy disagreement and a deliberate ending.
Why are most meetings an hour long?
Rogelberg's view is that there's no good reason; the hour is a default of calendar software. He suggests setting the length from the goals, citing Parkinson's Law, the idea that work expands to fill the time allotted.
How do I make a recurring meeting more productive?
Ask what would be different if it didn't happen, write the agenda as questions to answer, invite the people those questions need, and end by confirming who is doing what.
What is meeting recovery syndrome?
A term Rogelberg uses in the episode for the way a bad meeting lingers: people keep going over it afterward, alone and with each other, and report that it hurts their productivity.
What it says, and how it holds up
Two anthropologists in this episode make a point that goes beyond fixing meetings: they aren't only tools for solving problems. Helen Schwartzman suggests meetings are, in a sense, the organization itself, and Jen Sandler describes meetings held to ratify a decision already made elsewhere. If meetings do social work as well as practical work, cutting them blindly can cost something too. Most of the episode is about making the practical part better.
Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist and the author of The Surprising Science of Meetings, brings the habits and the numbers: the default hour, recycled agendas, and invite lists that grow because nobody wants to exclude anyone. Parker, a facilitator and the author of The Art of Gathering, brings the human side. In her view, too much politeness, what she calls unhealthy peace, can do as much damage to a group as unhealthy conflict, and in her experience, particularly in the US, it's the more common problem; her story of staging a mock cage match to get polite architects to disagree is likely the stretch you'll remember.
The episode is from 2019, and many of its figures are research findings Rogelberg relays without naming the studies on air, so they're better treated as signals than as settled facts. Even the wild dogs come with a caution: the researcher who studied their sneezes says she found a strong correlation with the pack's decision to move, not proof that a sneeze is a vote. When the trouble is one person who dominates every meeting, an agenda rewrite may not touch it; that usually calls for a word with them, or with whoever runs the meeting, about how the time gets shared.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.