Total meeting time must constantly increase.

To maintain managerial status quo total meeting time (TMT) must remain constant or increase.

The more meetings that are held, the more meetings become the actual product. As soon as management loses sight of the point of meetings and begins to focus on the meetings themselves the battle is lost. Eventually meetings become the metric by which work is measured therefore more meetings must mean more work is accomplished.

According to standard meeting-nomic theory eventually all the time on every employee’s schedule will be spent in meetings and every meeting room will be filled. This is known as the “meeting clearing point”. No more meetings can be added because all available conference rooms are filled and everyone is in meetings.

This is where normal macro-meeting-nomics ends and we need to explore micro-meeting-nomics where advanced research is being conducted to determine how to continue increasing meeting attendance with fewer available resources such as conference rooms or, gasp, employees.

One way that managers can increase their total meeting time is using a technique that corporations have used for production for years: outsourcing. In this case a manager outsources or “delegates” another employee to schedule and run a meeting. That frees the manager up to schedule and attend another meeting. Using the TMT metric it is then proved the most important product, meetings, is increased. Greater productivity through outsourcing!

This then brings into question the manager power/value proposition. If all employess are in meetings do we need as many managers? It has been shown the more meetings a person attend the less attention non-managerial attendees will be able to give. So we will need the managers more in order to distribute the information that was missed or ignored. This leads to another source of increased meeting production, the Meta-meeting: A meeting to discuss what was discussed in other meetings. Also as employees reach maximum meeting saturation less actual work is being done which leads to fewer perceived resources to accomplish tasks. This also creates a situation needing more managers to manage our ever-decreasing ratio of workers-to-work.

Now that we have established the basis for macro meeting-nomics we can delve deeper into micro meeting-nomics. Total quantity of meetings can only be maintained by manipulating various more complex parameters such as number of attendees, how much of each slide is read directly by the presenter, time of day of the meeting, amount of attention paid to the presentation and most importantly the number of attendees actually asleep. Thusly it is possible to reach the meeting inflation production goal of a 10% increase per year without adding employees simply by holding the same number of meetings but making them less useful.

By never documenting the details in any meeting, this lack-of-documentation serves as a feed-forward activation mechanism that ensures more meetings will then, obviously, require more meetings.

Eventually some employee may do actual work, intentionally or more likely simply by accident on their way to or from a meeting, and will therefore not be able to attend every meeting. This is why the micro-meeting-nomic theories regarding people attending meetings while simultaneously not accomplishing anything else can maintain total meeting output levels.

At this point traditional theories predicted that additional meetings would simply dilute attendance. However, the pandemic brought an increase in online “zoom” meetings and people would sometimes attend two or more meetings simultaneously. Additionally, recent research has shown employees working from home would outsource meeting attendance to children, dogs or house plants. This is an entirely new branch of meeting-nomics.