The Meeting You Canceled Did More Work Than the One You Kept (opens in new tab)

The meeting you canceled this morning did more useful work than the one you attended. That’s not a paradox. It’s what happens when you stop confusing presence with progress. Meetings have a peculiar status in knowledge work: they feel like output. You were there. You talked. Things were discussed. But activity is not the same thing as work, and the feeling of productivity is not productivity. The canceled meeting, by contrast, gave back something finite and irreplaceable: uninterrupted time. ...