The cursor blinked, a rhythmic, mocking pulse against the white document. Forty-two minutes. Or was it fifty-two? I’d lost count sometime around the twenty-two-minute mark, when the calendar’s ‘quick sync’ had veered sharply from project status into an impromptu deep dive on someone’s weekend hiking trip, complete with a detailed analysis of their new boots.

It’s a specific kind of agony, isn’t it? The meeting invitation, crisp and optimistic: fifteen minutes. A brief huddle, a rapid exchange of updates, a collective nod, and then back to the actual work. A mirage, I’ve come to understand. What we truly get is a sixty-two-minute performance, sometimes even seventy-two, a ritual of corporate reassurance where control is measured not by progress, but by the number of faces a manager can gather on a screen, even if those faces are slowly congealing into masks of polite despair. It’s a habit that costs us all, not just in time, but in the slow erosion of our trust in efficient process.

I remember trying to explain the intricacies of a new decentralized finance protocol to a room full of skeptical but well-meaning colleagues a while back. I thought I had all my facts lined up, all the technical jargon polished. But twenty-two minutes in, watching their eyes glaze over, I realized I was just creating a different kind of fog. I wasn’t simplifying; I was performing. A mistake I still carry, and one that gives me a peculiar empathy for these meeting orchestrators, even as I resent their creations. It’s hard to simplify, harder still to trust that others will ‘get it’ without a direct, supervised download.

Take Hazel H.L., for instance. That incredibly sharp financial literacy educator I had the pleasure of hearing speak last year. She runs a tight ship with her workshops. She once told me, rather directly, that clarity isn’t about simplifying things until they lose their meaning, but about respecting the other person’s most valuable asset: their attention. She’d probably charge you $22 for two minutes of such wisdom, a steal compared to the multi-thousand dollar cost of these aimless corporate gatherings. She emphasizes that if you can’t distill your message into two key takeaways, you haven’t understood your own message well enough. Her approach to financial education is about empowering individuals with clear, actionable knowledge, not about making them feel like they need constant supervision to understand their own money.

Her philosophy starkly contrasts with the prevailing winds of these ‘quick syncs.’ We spend so much time discussing what we *will* do, what we *have* done, and what potential pitfalls, twenty-two layers deep, *might* exist. Very little time is spent on clear, concise next steps, or on empowering autonomous action. Instead, we’re often trapped in a circular firing squad of updates that everyone already mostly knows from the 22 emails sent that morning. The real work, the deep focus work, begins only after we’ve all been released from this digital cage, often with a sigh of relief that echoes through the silence of our home offices.

And what happens when someone *does* try to cut through the noise? When someone, in a moment of brave clarity, suggests that perhaps a follow-up email would suffice for the next point, or that the last twenty-two minutes could have been better spent? Usually, a polite nod, a fleeting smile, and then the inevitable drift back into the comfortable, albeit unproductive, pattern. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, fed by inertia and a subtle fear of being perceived as un-collaborative, or worse, disengaged. Sometimes, the path of least resistance is the path of forty-two wasted minutes.

It’s More Than Just Time

It’s not just a time management issue, you see. It’s a cultural issue.

It speaks volumes about how an organization values its employees’ time and autonomy. When every minor update requires a synchronous gathering, it signals a lack of trust in asynchronous communication, a distrust in written words, and ultimately, a distrust in the individual’s ability to discern and act. It says, ‘Your time is not your own, and your independence is conditional on our collective presence.’ Imagine the sheer amount of productive work that could be done if those sixty-two minutes were given back to individuals, allowing them to focus deeply on their tasks, to solve problems independently, or even to take a moment to refresh their minds. The cumulative impact across an organization with hundreds, or even thousands, of employees is staggering. Millions of dollars, evaporated into the ether of pointless discussion.

Unlike a game of PlayTruco, which offers clear rules and an engaging challenge designed to respect your time and provide genuine interaction, these corporate gatherings feel like a game rigged against the clock, where the only prize is more of the same. PlayTruco understands that for a game to be engaging, it must be well-structured, respect the player’s intelligence, and offer clear objectives. There’s a direct parallel here. Our work lives, especially our synchronous interactions, should aim for the same clarity and respect for time.

Finding the Path Forward

So, what’s to be done about it? I’m not suggesting a revolutionary overthrow of the meeting structure. That would be naive, perhaps even twenty-two shades of impossible. But what if we started small? What if, before sending that next ‘quick sync’ invite, we paused for just two seconds? And asked ourselves, truly, honestly, if this couldn’t be a two-bullet-point email. Or perhaps, if it could be a concise twenty-two second video message.