By Kevin Langkiet, PhD, MSN, RN

Look at your calendar for the week ahead. Nearly every meeting on it probably starts on the hour or the half hour and runs for 30 or 60 minutes. Most of us never chose those lengths. The scheduling software offered them, and we accepted. Meeting length is a leadership decision, and it deserves the same thought as who attends and what gets decided.

Why Leaders Hold On to the Hour

Capable leaders keep the default for understandable reasons. Urgency makes it faster to accept a time slot than to design a meeting. Staffing pressure makes every problem feel like it needs a group conversation. Being in the room feels like leading, and solving the immediate problem is more satisfying than preparing for it. A full hour also feels safe, because nobody gets accused of cutting a discussion short.

Then there is an old observation. In 1955, C. Northcote Parkinson wrote that work expands to fill the time available to complete it. He meant it as satire about bureaucracy, but any leader who has watched a 20-minute decision stretch across an hour recognizes it.

What the Evidence Does and Does Not Show

The research offers some support, with limits. In a 1999 experiment in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Bluedorn, Turban, and Love compared 56 groups that met standing with 55 groups that met seated. The seated meetings ran 34 percent longer and produced no better decisions. The study tested posture, not calendar blocks, and it used student groups on a simulated problem, so it cannot prove that 30 minutes always equals 60. It does show that extra time does not automatically buy better thinking.

The history holds a surprise. Henry Mintzberg’s 1973 observation of chief executives found an average meeting of about 41 minutes, and a replication roughly 30 years later found 42. What changed is volume. Studies in the late 1980s found managers averaging 8.4 hours a week in meetings, and industry reports citing Microsoft data put the rise in meeting volume at 252 percent since early 2020. The typical meeting did not get much longer. We scheduled far more of them, nearly all in the same default blocks.

An Illustrative Example

This is an illustrative scenario, not a real event. Picture a nurse director whose unit leadership team meets every Tuesday for 60 minutes. She reviews her last four agendas and finds that only two items required a group decision. The rest were updates people could have read in advance. She moves the updates into a one-page summary due the day before, sets the meeting at 30 minutes, and opens with the two decisions.

Notice what she does not do. She does not shut anyone out or lower her standards. She asks managers to arrive prepared, names an owner for each decision, and follows up the next week on what was committed. This is where Servant Leadership and accountability meet. Protecting your team’s time is a form of service, but it works only when paired with clear expectations and follow-through.

Questions to Ask Before You Book the Time

• What decision, or what shared understanding, must this meeting produce?
• Who must be in the room, and who can be informed afterward?
• What can people read or do before they arrive?
• What is the shortest time in which we can do this well?

Set the length from your answers, not from the calendar default. Consider 25 or 50 minutes in place of 30 or 60, which leaves room to breathe between meetings. A small 2021 Microsoft study of 14 people found that back-to-back video meetings built up stress-related brain activity, while 10-minute breaks prevented it. Treat that as a signal, not settled science. And some meetings deserve more time. A difficult performance conversation or a strategic planning session should never be rushed to fit a rule.

The Takeaway

There is no universal ideal length. The ideal meeting is the shortest one that lets the right people finish the work it exists to do. This month, choose one recurring meeting, shorten it by a third, and watch what happens to the decisions and the follow-through. If you would like help building leadership habits like this one, ENLI is here to support you.