A young founder once pitched on Shark Tank wearing a bathrobe and slippers. His product was an app called Beulr (a nod to Ferris Bueller's Day Off) that attended your meetings for you. You'd upload a short video of yourself nodding along, and your digital double would sit in the Zoom call while you did something else.
The Sharks declined. The internet didn't. The clip went viral. Comments piled in, equal parts laughter and confession.
Because beneath the joke sat a question most professionals have quietly asked themselves at some point: if a looping video of me can fulfil my role in this meeting, what exactly is my role?
If your presence adds nothing, your absence should cost nothing.
Presence is not work
The Beulr pitch resonated because it exposed something that everyone already knew but nobody was saying out loud. Most meetings don't require most of the people in them.
Somewhere along the way, presence became a proxy for productivity. Tiny squares on Zoom as proof that you're at your desk and engaged. The meeting could be pointless, poorly run, or entirely unrelated to your actual work, but your attendance was mandatory.
This isn't a remote work problem. It existed in offices too. But remote work made it more visible because the cost of a pointless meeting became harder to ignore. In an office, you can at least pretend to take notes. On Zoom, you're just staring at a screen for an hour, accomplishing nothing, fully aware that you're accomplishing nothing.
What happened when I started saying no
A few years ago, after a particularly dense week of back-to-back meetings, I started declining them.
Gently at first. "What's the agenda for this one?" Then more directly. "What's the expected outcome?" Then with more confidence. "I don't think I'm needed for this."
The results were instructive. Nothing collapsed. No projects stalled. No relationships suffered. What happened instead was that people started thinking before adding me to invites. A few colleagues quietly told me they'd tried the same thing and discovered entire afternoons of reclaimed focus.
The uncomfortable truth is that most meetings exist to signal busyness, maintain the appearance of collaboration, and soothe collective guilt about not communicating enough. Very few of them exist because a group of specific people need to make a specific decision together in real time. And that's the only kind of meeting that justifies pulling people away from their actual work.
The AI meeting absurdity
Fast forward to today and the situation has become almost comically circular. AI attends meetings for you. AI takes notes. AI emails you a summary you don't have time to read because you're in another meeting being summarised by another AI.
We're approaching a point where AI meets with AI, exchanges pleasantries, and produces action items that no human reads. It sounds like satire, but it's not far from current reality in many organisations.
What Beulr revealed accidentally and what AI now emphasises with a megaphone is this: if a meeting can be replaced by an automated process, it probably should be. The technology is just making the redundancy impossible to ignore.
The filter that changes your calendar
The practical takeaway is a single question: does this meeting require my specific input, in real time, to produce a decision or outcome that couldn't happen otherwise?
If yes, attend and contribute fully. If no, decline, ask for a summary afterwards, or suggest it could be an email or a shared document.
This isn't about being anti-meeting or difficult to work with. It's about recognising that your time and attention are finite resources, and every hour spent in a meeting where you're not genuinely needed is an hour stolen from work that actually requires your brain.
Try declining one meeting this week. Just one. See what happens. In my experience, nothing breaks, nobody panics, and you suddenly remember what it feels like to have an uninterrupted stretch of time to do real work.
Your calendar won't protect itself. That's your job.