Meetings Are Often Avoidance

At Amazon, if something felt hard or unclear, the reflex was always the same: get people in a room. It felt responsible. It felt collaborative. Looking back, a fair number of those meetings weren’t either of those things — they were avoidance, just dressed up with an agenda and a calendar invite.

A meeting about a problem is genuinely easier than solving the problem. It has a start time and an end time. Other people are there to share the weight of it. You leave feeling like something happened, even when the actual decision — the hard part — still hasn’t been made. Thinking something through on your own, and coming out the other side with a real answer, doesn’t have any of that scaffolding. It’s slower to feel productive, even when it’s the thing that actually moves you forward.

I noticed this first at Amazon, where the contrast with everything I’d done before — NGO management, building websites on my own — was impossible to ignore. No team to loop in. No meeting to schedule about a decision — just me, the problem, and whatever I decided to do about it. It was uncomfortable at first. I’d built nine years of habit around bringing people into a room whenever something got difficult. Sitting alone with a decision felt exposed in a way a meeting never did.

But it taught me something I still use running YVO. Before I book a call or set up a meeting — with a client, about my own business, anything — I ask myself one question: is this a meeting because I genuinely need someone else’s input, or because I don’t want to sit with the decision on my own? Most of the time, if I’m honest, the answer tells me I already know what I think. I just haven’t given myself the quiet ten minutes to admit it.

That’s not an argument against meetings. Plenty of decisions genuinely need other people’s input, and collaboration is worth the calendar space. But it’s worth noticing how many meetings on your calendar right now exist because thinking alone felt harder than getting company for the problem.

Your turn: is there a meeting on your calendar this week that’s really standing in for a decision you could just make?