The Psychology of Meeting Addicts — Why Veterans and Juniors Love Meetings for Entirely Different Reasons

• Target audience: Software engineers, team leads, managers
• Prerequisites: None
• Reading time: 20 min

Overview

“Let’s just set up a quick meeting” — how many times has this phrase hijacked your calendar? According to Microsoft’s research, Teams meetings have increased by roughly threefold since 2020¹. Meanwhile, 71% of managers say meetings are “costly and unproductive”².

Here’s the interesting part: meeting enthusiasts exist across all experience levels. But a senior manager who loves meetings and a junior developer who keeps scheduling them are driven by completely different psychological mechanisms. This article unpacks the generational psychology of meeting dependency, drawing on research in behavioral science, and offers practical escape routes for engineering teams trapped in “meeting hell.”

Universal Psychology: Why Sitting in a Room Feels Like Working

Regardless of generation, our brains come pre-loaded with biases that make meetings feel like work.

Action Bias: The Need to Do Something

Bar-Eli et al. (2007) analyzed penalty kicks in professional soccer³. Statistically, goalkeepers who stay in the center have a higher save rate — yet they dive left or right on nearly every kick. Why? Because “doing nothing and failing” feels worse than “trying and failing.” This is action bias.

Meetings exploit the same mechanism. When facing a complex technical challenge, scheduling a meeting generates an immediate sense of “I’m handling this.” You haven’t written a single line of code, but the moment you post “Meeting scheduled!” on Slack, your brain logs it as progress.

Mere Urgency Effect: Calendar Items Feel Urgent

Zhu, Yang & Hsee (2018) demonstrated in five experiments published in the Journal of Consumer Research that people prioritize objectively unimportant tasks simply because they have deadlines⁴. This “Mere Urgency Effect” violates the basic principle of rational decision-making (the dominance principle).

Meetings appear on your calendar as time-bound events, automatically slotting into the “urgent” category in your brain. The result? Deep work — writing architecture docs, refactoring critical code — gets perpetually postponed. “I was in meetings all day” becomes the default excuse.

Productivity Theater: The Busyness Performance

A 2023 Visier survey of 1,000 full-time American employees found that 83% had engaged in “performative work” — actions designed to signal busyness rather than produce results — in the past year⁵. Of those, 43% spent more than 10 hours per week on such performance.

Meetings are the lowest-effort form of productivity theater. A packed calendar looks busy. Even without speaking, you get credit for “attending.” Everyone performs busyness, and no one calls it out — a dynamic that transcends generations.

Veterans’ Meeting Addiction: Control and Status

Let’s start with the generational breakdown. First up: “the boss who calls meetings about everything.”

Busyness as a Status Symbol

Bellezza, Paharia & Keinan (2017), in a Columbia-Harvard joint study published in Journal of Consumer Research, experimentally demonstrated that being busy and time-poor has become a status symbol⁶. Busy people are perceived as “competent, ambitious, and in high demand.”

A manager whose calendar is wall-to-wall meetings is seen as an “important, sought-after figure” — and they internalize that perception. “I had ten meetings today…” is technically a complaint but functionally a humble brag. Sound familiar?

Note: the study found this effect reverses in Italy compared to the US, indicating cultural dependence. However, in work cultures that valorize long hours (common in Japan and many tech companies globally), similar mechanisms likely apply.

“Meetings = Management” Fallacy

Analysis of meeting culture in traditional Japanese companies by Worker’s Resort reveals patterns common to veteran managers worldwide⁷:

• Too many attendees: Observers and “FYI” participants bloat the headcount
• Silent participants: Seniority-based speaking norms mean some people never say a word
• No decisions made: Meetings end with “we’ll look into it”
• Real work happens outside meetings: The meeting is a “ceremony”; actual decisions are made in sidebar conversations

The common thread: meetings become a device for feeling “in control” rather than a venue for actual decision-making.

Anxious Managers Can’t Let Go

Research featured in the Association for Psychological Science shows that managers who feel insecure about their authority are more likely to micromanage⁸. Those confident in their position actively delegate; those plagued by insecurity want to “keep tabs on everything” and avoid delegation.

Meetings are the micromanager’s ideal tool. “Sync meeting,” “progress update,” “alignment check” — these names legitimize what is essentially “I’m anxious unless I personally verify every detail.”

Time Is Borrowed, Not Free

As PRESIDENT Online argues, many organizations fundamentally lack the concept that “other people’s time is borrowed”⁹. Pulling five people into a 30-minute meeting doesn’t cost 30 minutes — it costs 2.5 hours of team capacity. Veterans who schedule meetings without calculating this aggregate opportunity cost are unknowingly draining organizational resources.

Juniors’ Meeting Addiction: Anxiety and the Craving for Connection

Junior engineers’ meeting dependency runs on a completely different engine.

Managing Uncertainty and Anxiety

Less experienced engineers frequently lack confidence in their own judgment. Design direction, technology selection, debugging — every decision triggers “Am I doing this right?” Meeting attendance distributes this anxiety across the group.

“We all decided together” dilutes individual responsibility and cushions the psychological blow of failure. Social psychologists call this “Diffusion of Responsibility”¹⁰.

No Clear Definition of “Work Done”

Veterans know intuitively that one hour of focused coding is valuable work. Juniors often struggle to define what counts as “having worked.” Writing code is scary (the PR review might be brutal). Writing documentation doesn’t feel like “real work” either. But attending a meeting produces an indisputable fact: “I was there.”

Meeting FOMO

Whillans, Feldman & Wisniewski (2021) identified six psychological traps behind meeting overload in HBR¹¹. First on the list: Meeting FOMO — “If I skip this meeting, I’ll miss critical information” or “If I’m not there, people will forget I exist.”

In remote work environments, meetings often become the only venue for human connection, amplifying FOMO. Juniors are especially vulnerable because they haven’t yet built robust organizational relationships.

The Craving for Instant Feedback

IEEE research on Gen Z workplace communication found that while younger workers prefer instant messaging, they also have a strong desire for immediate feedback¹². Asynchronous communication (documents, Issues, PRs) requires waiting. Meetings deliver real-time responses. This preference for immediacy fuels meeting dependency.

Generational Comparison: Same Room, Different Reasons

The Gen Z Paradox: “Meetings Are Terrible, But I Need Them”

“Digital-native Gen Z must hate meetings” — this intuition is half right, half wrong.

A Robert Walters survey found that only 11% of Gen Z and Millennials considered “calls and meetings productive”¹³. Compared to older generations, they rated meetings as unproductive 44% more often.

Generation	Meeting Attitude	Preferred Communication
Baby Boomers	Value face-to-face (65% preference)	In-person, phone
Gen X	Meetings necessary but efficiency-focused	Email, in-person when needed
Millennials	Prefer async over meetings	IM, email
Gen Z	Rate meetings as least productive	IM (55% preference)

(Sources: IEEE¹², Robert Walters¹³. Survey populations differ across generations; direct comparison requires caution.)

But here’s the contradiction. A 2025 Harris Poll/Freeman survey found that 91% of Gen Z want “a balance of virtual and in-person opportunities,” and 89% say “relationships built in person are essential to professional confidence”¹⁴.

In other words, Gen Z hates formal meetings but craves meaningful connection. Having experienced remote education and remote onboarding during the pandemic, this generation faces a structural deficit in face-to-face relationship building. When they push for meetings that “could have been a Slack thread,” it’s often not about the agenda — it’s about wanting to see other humans.

Japanese Gen Z: “I Want to Blend In”

A joint survey by SHIBUYA109 lab. and Kanazawa University (457 workers in their 20s, 480 aged 40+) reveals tendencies specific to Japanese Gen Z¹⁵:

• 28.4% want to “be seen as part of a group, avoiding individual attention”
• 26.9% prioritize “lifestyle over career advancement”
• 24.1% prefer “only the minimum necessary communication”

“Minimum communication” and “meeting lover” seem contradictory, but there’s a structural explanation. The drive to avoid standing out and avoid bearing individual responsibility means that group-decision-making via meetings feels psychologically safer than making solo calls. For this cohort, meetings function as a psychological safety mechanism rather than a productivity tool.

The Structural Gap

Synthesizing the research, it’s clear that the same “love of meetings” is driven by fundamentally different psychology:

	Veterans	Juniors
Meeting function	Arena for control	Source of safety
Core emotion	“I need to stay on top of everything”	“I’m afraid of making the wrong call”
What they get	Status, proof of relevance	Distributed responsibility, belonging
Ideal meeting	60 min, they’re running it	30 min, everyone’s there
**“Good meeting” = **	“My opinion won”	“We all agreed”

Veterans grumble that “juniors schedule too many meetings.” Juniors sigh that “the boss calls another pointless meeting.” Both perceive the other’s meetings as waste while considering their own essential — and this is what makes the meeting problem so intractable.

Six Psychological Traps That Make Meetings Self-Replicate

Whillans et al. (2021) identified six meeting traps¹¹ that manifest in engineering teams as follows:

1. Meeting FOMO

“If I wasn’t in that design review, I won’t know the rationale.” So you attend tangential meetings “just in case.”

2. Selfish Urgency

A tech lead schedules a “quick sync” to resolve their own question. Five engineers are pulled in for 30 minutes — 2.5 hours of collective capacity gone.

3. Meetings as Commitment Devices

“I’ll have this done by the next meeting” — using meetings as pseudo-deadlines when a Jira ticket would suffice.

4. Mere Urgency Effect

Preparing slides for the meeting becomes an “urgent task,” bumping genuinely important work like refactoring or performance optimization.

5. Meeting Amnesia

Nobody remembers what was decided last time, so the same topic gets re-discussed. Minutes either don’t exist or aren’t read.

6. Pluralistic Ignorance

Everyone thinks “this meeting is pointless” but nobody says so, assuming they’re the only one who feels that way. This is a classical social psychology concept first described by Katz & Allport (1931)¹⁶.

It’s 5:39 PM on Friday. You’re exhausted. But everyone else looks engaged (or so you think). In reality, everyone wants to leave — that’s pluralistic ignorance in action.

Bikeshedding: Why Trivial Topics Get the Most Debate

In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson proposed the “Law of Triviality”¹⁷. A nuclear plant design committee approved the multi-million-dollar reactor in minutes but debated the color of the bike shed roof for hours.

The reactor is too complex for most committee members to have an opinion. But everyone can weigh in on a bike shed. Discussion time gravitates toward topics where everyone can feel they “contributed.”

The same happens in engineering. Microservice architecture decisions take 15 minutes (“sounds good, let’s go”), while variable naming conventions or formatter configs consume an hour. Both veterans and juniors fall into this trap — and both leave the room feeling satisfied, which makes it especially insidious.

Meeting Costs by the Numbers

Global Data

Metric	Value	Source
Annual meeting hours per employee	392 hours (~16 work days)	Flowtrace (2025)18
Workers who say “too many meetings to do actual work”	78%	Atlassian survey19
Hours/week in unproductive meetings (2x vs 2019)	5 hours	Asana (2024)20
Time to regain focus after a meeting	23 min 15 sec	Gloria Mark, UCI (2008)21

Data from Japanese Companies

The Persol Research and Consulting survey quantified meeting waste in Japanese organizations²²:

Role Level	Annual Meeting Hours	% Perceived as Waste
Individual contributor	154 hours	23.3%
Section manager	~301 hours	27.5%
Department head	434+ hours	27.5%

The pattern: the higher the role, the more meeting hours AND the higher the waste perception. Department heads spend 434+ hours/year in meetings while considering ~30% wasteful — meaning they knowingly sit through ~130 hours of meetings they believe are pointless every year.

For a 10,000-employee organization, wasteful meetings are estimated to cost approximately 1.5 billion yen (~$10M USD; equivalent to ~670,000 hours or the annual working capacity of 332 employees).

Meeting-Free Days Work

Research published in MIT Sloan Management Review found that one meeting-free day per week improved productivity by 35%, and two days by 71%². Shopify famously cancelled all recurring meetings with 3+ participants in 2023 and designated Wednesdays as meeting-free²³.

Social Loafing: More People, Less Effort

Max Ringelmann’s late 19th-century discovery — now called the “Ringelmann Effect” — showed that individual effort decreases as group size increases¹⁰. In tug-of-war experiments, per-person force was 93% of individual capacity in two-person teams but dropped to 49% in eight-person teams.

Social loafing in meetings transcends generations:

• Silent attendees: In meetings of 8+, only 2-3 people make meaningful contributions
• “I’m just listening” justification: Attending “for awareness” when a 5-minute Slack message would convey the same information
• Diffusion of responsibility: “We all decided” functionally means “nobody’s accountable”

Amazon’s “Two-Pizza Rule” — meeting attendance should be limited to the number of people two pizzas can feed — directly addresses social loafing²⁴.

The Prescription: Generational Approaches to Breaking Meeting Dependency

The challenge with meeting addiction is that veterans and juniors are dependent for different reasons, so one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work. Effective interventions must address each generation’s underlying psychology.

For Everyone

Flip the Default

• Async first: Start discussions in GitHub Issues, Slack threads, or documents
• Meetings are for escalation: Before scheduling, ask “Could this be a Slack thread?”
• Decisions live in documents: Nothing is “decided in a meeting.” It’s decided when it’s documented

Redesign Time

• Default to 15 minutes, not 30: Use Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill available time) in reverse
• Mandatory agenda: Not a formality — list 1-3 specific decisions to be made
• Define exit criteria: “We’re done when X is decided”

Break Pluralistic Ignorance

• Anonymous quarterly survey: “Is this recurring meeting still necessary?”
• Build a culture of questioning: Team leads should model “No agenda this week, so we’re skipping”
• Trial meeting-free days: One day per week, no meetings

For Veterans: Practice Letting Go

Veterans’ meeting dependency is rooted in control and anxiety.

• Calculate total team cost: Before every invite, compute attendees x duration. Five people for 30 minutes = 2.5 hours of team capacity⁹
• Build meetings that don’t need you: Invest in documentation and meeting notes that enable your team to run meetings without you present
• Cap attendance: Based on social loafing research, use the Two-Pizza Rule (5-7 max). “FYI attendees” get the meeting notes instead
• Measure status by output, not calendar density: Shift from “I had 10 meetings today” to “I unblocked this problem today”

For Juniors: Provide Connection Through Other Channels

Juniors’ dependency is rooted in anxiety and the need for belonging. Simply cutting meetings leaves them without their primary anxiety-management mechanism, risking isolation.

• Provide decision frameworks: Document guidelines like “This type of question → Slack” and “This type → PR comment.” Eliminate the uncertainty of “Am I allowed to ask this?”
• Model async communication: Veterans should visibly make decisions via Issues and documents, showing juniors that “async works”
• Use 1:1s to catch anxiety: Regular 1:1s to ask “What decisions are you unsure about?” provide a structured alternative to ad-hoc meetings
• Design non-meeting connection points: Pair programming, mob sessions, casual lunches, Slack watercooler channels. Gen Z doesn’t want “a 60-minute meeting with an agenda” — they want the feeling of working alongside others

AI Tools: A Third Option

Many of the meetings juniors schedule stem from “quick questions” — “Is this approach correct?” “What’s causing this error?” Meanwhile, veterans call meetings to align understanding across the team. AI chat tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) can absorb some of these needs.

For juniors’ “quick questions”:

• AI as rubber duck: “Is this design sound?” or “What’s this error about?” — bouncing ideas off AI before asking a senior engineer improves question quality and eliminates “I didn’t need to ask” cases
• The rubber duck effect: Formulating a question for AI often clarifies your own thinking enough to find the answer independently. Making “ask AI before scheduling a meeting” a habit reduces consultation-driven meetings
• Instant feedback substitute: The “immediate response” experience juniors crave is partially available through AI chat — a 24/7 sounding board for a generation with low tolerance for async waiting times

For veterans’ “alignment” needs:

• Pre-meeting prep: Use AI to generate discussion frameworks, option comparison tables, and draft proposals before meetings. Most “alignment” can be handled asynchronously, letting the actual meeting focus on decision-making
• Automated, structured minutes: AI-generated meeting notes that auto-categorize decisions, action items, and open questions prevent “meeting amnesia” — no more re-discussing topics because nobody remembers what was decided

Caveat: AI can’t take final responsibility for decisions. It’s useful for technical brainstorming but can’t replace face-to-face communication for consensus-building or nuanced interpersonal dynamics. AI is a tool for eliminating unnecessary meetings, not for replacing human connection. The goal is to replace meetings that shouldn’t exist with AI, freeing time for the conversations that truly matter.

Conclusion

“Meeting lovers” come in two varieties.

The veteran type uses meetings to maintain control and status. A packed calendar is proof of importance, and monitoring every detail soothes their anxiety.

The junior type uses meetings to find safety and connection. Group decisions distribute responsibility, and face time confirms belonging.

Both types share underlying mechanisms: action bias (doing nothing feels wrong), Mere Urgency Effect (calendar items seem urgent), and pluralistic ignorance (everyone thinks the meeting is pointless but nobody says so).

Gen Z, in particular, presents a paradox: they recognize meetings as unproductive yet need them as a connection point. Cutting meetings without providing alternative connection channels will isolate them. Simultaneously, leaving veterans’ “check-in meetings” unchallenged means the team’s deep focus time continues to erode.

As Gloria Mark’s research shows, the true cost of a 30-minute meeting isn’t 30 minutes — it’s roughly one hour including recovery time²¹.

Start small: next week, pick one recurring meeting and ask the team, “Do we actually need this?” There’s a good chance that veterans and juniors alike will answer “I never thought it was necessary” — the odds are higher than you think.

Related Articles

• The Psychology of “D3” — Why People Search for Reasons Not to Act - The cognitive biases that prevent action
• The Problem with Black-and-White Thinking - Why “all meetings are waste” is its own kind of distortion
• The Value of AI Goes Beyond Time Savings - What real productivity looks like

References

Numbered references correspond to in-text citations.

Additional References (not cited by number in text)

• 30+ Meeting Statistics for 2025 - My Hours (2025). Aggregated meeting statistics from multiple surveys. Reliability: Medium-High
• Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem - Harvard Business Review (2022). Proposes solutions for meeting overload. Reliability: Medium-High
• The Anxious Micromanager - Harvard Business Review (2023). Analysis of the psychological drivers of micromanagement. Reliability: Medium-High

1. Microsoft Work Trend Index - Microsoft (2023). Global survey of 31,000 people. Reported 192% increase in Teams meetings since 2020. Reliability: High ↩︎

2. The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days - MIT Sloan Management Review (2022). Found meeting-free days improved productivity by 35% (1 day/week) and 71% (2 days/week). Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎ ↩︎²

3. Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers - Bar-Eli, M., Azar, O.H., Ritov, I., Keidar-Levin, Y., & Schein, G. (2007). Journal of Economic Psychology, 28(5), 606-621. Peer-reviewed. Reliability: High ↩︎

4. The Mere Urgency Effect - Zhu, M., Yang, Y., & Hsee, C.K. (2018). Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3), 673-690. Peer-reviewed. Five experiments. Reliability: High ↩︎

5. New Survey: Performative Work and Productivity Theater - Visier (2023). Survey of 1,000 full-time American employees. 83% reported engaging in performative work. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎

6. Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol - Bellezza, S., Paharia, N., & Keinan, A. (2017). Journal of Consumer Research, 44(1), 118-138. Peer-reviewed. Columbia & Harvard. Reliability: High ↩︎

7. Ten Problems with Japanese-Style Meetings - Worker’s Resort. Analysis of structural problems in Japanese meeting culture from an international perspective. Reliability: Medium ↩︎

8. The Trait That Turns Some Bosses into Micromanagers - Association for Psychological Science. Managers insecure about their authority are more prone to micromanagement. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎

9. Why Pointless Meetings Never Disappear in Japanese Companies - PRESIDENT Online. Argues Japanese organizations lack the concept that “time is borrowed.” Reliability: Medium ↩︎ ↩︎²

10. Social Loafing: Understanding, Mitigating, and Enhancing Group Performance - Comprehensive review of social loafing research, covering the Ringelmann Effect and diffusion of responsibility. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎ ↩︎²

11. The Psychology Behind Meeting Overload - Whillans, A., Feldman, D., & Wisniewski, D. (2021). Harvard Business Review. Identifies six psychological traps. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎ ↩︎²

12. Generation Z Workplace Communication Habits and Expectations - IEEE (2021). Research on Gen Z workplace communication habits and preferences. Peer-reviewed. Reliability: High ↩︎ ↩︎²

13. ‘It could have been an email’: almost half of young professionals view work calls & meetings as inefficient - Robert Walters. Survey on Gen Z and Millennial attitudes toward meetings. Only 11% find them meaningful. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎ ↩︎²

14. Gen Z workers feel isolated by tech and crave more in-person interaction, survey says - CNBC (2025). Harris Poll/Freeman joint survey. 91% of Gen Z want a balance of virtual and in-person opportunities. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎

15. Z世代と上司世代の仕事観ギャップに関する調査 - SHIBUYA109 lab. & Kanazawa University (2025). Joint survey of 457 workers in their 20s and 480 aged 40+. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎

16. A century of pluralistic ignorance - Frontiers in Social Psychology (2023). Comprehensive review of 100 years of pluralistic ignorance research. Peer-reviewed. Reliability: High ↩︎

17. Law of Triviality - Parkinson, C.N. (1957). Parkinson’s Law, or The Pursuit of Progress. Describes how organizations disproportionately focus on trivial matters. Reliability: Medium (conceptual framework) ↩︎

18. 100+ Meeting Statistics - Flowtrace (2025). Statistical report based on analysis of 1.3 million meetings. Reports 392 hours of annual meeting time per employee. Reliability: Medium ↩︎

19. Workplace Woes: Meetings - Atlassian. Survey data on workplace meeting culture. Reliability: Medium ↩︎

20. State of Work Innovation 2024 Global Report - Asana (2024). Global survey of 13,000+ knowledge workers. Reports unproductive meeting time doubled since 2019 to 5 hours/week. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎

21. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress - Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). CHI 2008 Conference. Analyzes the cost of workplace interruptions. The 23 min 15 sec figure is widely cited from Gloria Mark’s interviews. Peer-reviewed. Reliability: High ↩︎ ↩︎²

22. ムダな会議による企業の損失は年間15億円 - Persol Research and Consulting (2018). Survey quantifying meeting waste in Japanese organizations. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎

23. Shopify just deleted 12,000 meetings from employee calendars - CNN Business (2023). Reports Shopify’s cancellation of all recurring meetings with 3+ participants and designation of Wednesdays as meeting-free. Reliability: Medium-High ↩︎

24. The Surprising Science of Meetings - Rogelberg, S.G. (2019). Oxford University Press. Comprehensive analysis based on 15 years of meeting research with 5,000+ survey participants. Reliability: High ↩︎