The default meeting length in most companies is thirty minutes or an hour. Not because those durations are optimal, but because Google Calendar makes them the easiest options. We’ve structured enormous portions of our working lives around a software default, and almost nobody questions it.
I started questioning it about two years ago, after a week where I counted my meeting hours and realized I’d spent twenty-two hours in calls — many of which could have been emails, Loom videos, or ten-minute conversations that bloated to fill their allotted time. Something had to change.
So we started running meetings in twenty-two minutes. The number is slightly arbitrary — a nod to the fact that it’s not thirty, not fifteen, but somewhere that forces economy without creating panic. And the results have been remarkable.
Why Thirty Minutes Doesn’t Work
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available. Meetings are its most perfect expression. Give a team thirty minutes, and they’ll use thirty minutes. Give them an hour, and they’ll fill that too. The content doesn’t change — the pacing does. Conversations meander. Context gets repeated for latecomers. Small talk extends. Tangents multiply.
The thirty-minute meeting is also poorly structured for attention. Research on cognitive focus suggests that sustained attention starts to decline after about twenty minutes. By the time a standard meeting reaches its most important agenda items — which, in my experience, are almost always at the end — the participants are already drifting.
Shorter meetings reverse this dynamic. When you have twenty-two minutes, there’s no time for lengthy preambles. You start with the most important item. You make decisions rather than discussing endlessly. The constraint creates urgency, and urgency creates focus.
The Structure
Our twenty-two-minute meeting follows a simple structure that we’ve refined over dozens of iterations.
Minutes one through two: context. The meeting owner spends no more than two minutes framing the purpose. Not background. Not history. Just: here’s what we’re deciding or discussing today, and here’s what a successful outcome looks like.
Minutes three through fifteen: the work. This is the core of the meeting. Discussion, debate, decision. Whatever the meeting is for, it happens here. The key discipline is staying on the agenda. Tangential topics get noted and parked for a separate conversation.
Minutes sixteen through twenty: decisions and owners. Every meeting ends with explicit documentation of what was decided and who owns what. This sounds obvious, but the number of meetings that end without clear next steps is staggering. We use the last five minutes to make sure everyone leaves with the same understanding.
Minutes twenty-one through twenty-two: buffer. Two minutes of breathing room before the next commitment. Enough time to jot a note, refill a coffee, or simply sit with the information before context-switching.
Fewer People in the Room
Shorter meetings have a natural side effect: they force you to be selective about attendees. You can’t run an efficient twenty-two-minute meeting with twelve people. The dynamics don’t work. Too many voices, too many perspectives to surface, too many relationship dynamics to navigate.
Our rule of thumb is five people maximum. If more than five people need the information, we send a recording or a written summary. If more than five people need to contribute, we break it into smaller groups.
This has been one of the most impactful changes. Not just for meeting efficiency, but for the broader organization. People who aren’t in meetings are doing work. And most of the time, their work is more valuable than their presence in a room where they’re not actively contributing.
The pushback we got initially was about inclusion — people felt left out. We addressed that by being more disciplined about sharing meeting outcomes. Fewer people in the meeting, but better communication afterward. The tradeoff is overwhelmingly positive.
The Agenda as Contract
None of this works without agendas. And not the kind of agenda that gets created thirty seconds before the meeting — a real agenda, circulated at least an hour in advance, with specific items and the expected outcome for each.
We treat the agenda as a contract. If it doesn’t exist, the meeting doesn’t happen. If an item isn’t on the agenda, it doesn’t get discussed. These feel like rigid rules, and they are. But the rigidity serves a purpose: it forces the meeting owner to think before they convene, which alone eliminates a significant percentage of unnecessary meetings.
The discipline of writing an agenda also clarifies whether a meeting is needed at all. Many of the agendas I’ve started drafting turned into Slack messages or emails instead, because the act of articulating the purpose revealed that a synchronous conversation wasn’t necessary.
What We Lost, What We Gained
I’ll be honest about what shorter meetings sacrifice. There’s less room for spontaneous conversation. Less space for the kind of meandering discussion that occasionally produces unexpected insights. The serendipity of a long meeting — where someone mentions something tangential that turns out to be important — is diminished.
But what we gained is substantial. Our team has an average of six to eight more hours of uninterrupted work per week. Decisions that used to take three meetings now take one. People arrive focused and leave with clarity. And the overall quality of meetings has improved dramatically, because everyone knows the time is limited and behaves accordingly.
Twenty-two minutes is not sacred. Twenty or twenty-five would work too. The point is not the number — it’s the principle. Default meeting lengths are arbitrary. Questioning them is one of the highest-leverage changes a team can make. And once you experience the difference, thirty minutes starts to feel like an eternity.