The Meeting Booked For Thirty, Done In Four

I can shave in three minutes or in twelve, depending on how late I'm running. The shave doesn't need twelve minutes. I do, apparently, when I have them.

Booked a call last week for thirty minutes, because thirty is what the calendar gives you when you don't touch the dropdown. Nobody chose thirty. The software chose it and we all just accepted it, the way you accept the tip percentages a machine suggests. We covered the whole thing in four minutes. Clear ask, clear answer, done.

Then nobody hung up. We sat there for another twenty-two minutes and found things to talk about. Someone brought up a client story that didn't need bringing up. Someone else added a piece of scope that wasn't part of the original ask, and now it was a decision, made in a meeting that existed to fill time it didn't need. I noticed myself doing it too — reaching for one more item to raise, not because it mattered right then, but because ending a thirty-minute meeting at minute four felt like admitting the meeting shouldn't have been thirty minutes.

I'd been doing a worse version of this for years before I found out it has a name — Parkinson's Law, the idea that work expands to fill the time you give it. I'd seen it as a scheduling quirk. Turns out it's closer to a law than a quirk. Give a task an hour and it takes an hour. Give it four minutes and, evidently, it still takes twenty-six, because someone in the room decides the four minutes wasn't enough proof of work.

What I'm not sure about is whether the fix is booking shorter meetings or just being willing to end them early without it feeling like I shortchanged someone. I've started booking fifteen for things that are probably four. I still don't love ending a meeting at minute four in front of people. It feels like I'm rushing them, even when the thing is actually done.

If you run meetings shorter than the calendar defaults to, how do you keep it from feeling like you're pushing people out the door before they're ready to leave?