On the Folly of Manufacturing Momentum Through Meetings
Why Momentum Can’t Be Scheduled
(This is a follow-on article from the short story, “The Meeting Golem”)
Catch me IRL: I shall be speaking at DevOpsCon Munich 2025 from December 1st to 5th.
There’s a particular flavour of madness that tends to afflict contemporary software organisations. It’s subtle at first, like the faint hum of fluorescent lights or the background buzz of an air conditioner you only notice once it stops.
You feel it the moment calendar notifications begin breeding like fruit flies. You recognise it fully the day you open your laptop and discover that, while you technically have an eight-hour workday, you own perhaps forty-seven contiguous minutes of actual thought.
The tragedy is that no villain designed this. It wasn’t sabotage. It wasn’t even malice. It was momentum-theatre triggered by the often-hidden nature of our work. It comes from the belief that if you put enough people in enough rooms for enough time, the organisation will somehow accelerate.
Meetings — increasingly recursive, self-reinforcing, and self-indulgent — metastasise into the organisational bloodstream until the whole system starts running on alignment ceremonies rather than actual alignment.
This is how it happens.
Executives feel pressure. Delivery slows. A board slide-deck looks thin. A regulator asks a pointed question. Someone in the upper echelons senses the vague, non-specific dread that Something Must Be Done. And because meetings are visible, tangible, administratively convenient, and endlessly schedule-able, they become the chosen tool of false momentum.
The result isn’t progress — it’s organisational arrhythmia.
The most heinous cost isn’t even the time spent in meetings. It’s the cognitive debris left behind. Every meeting fractures attention. Every context switch extracts tax. Every demand for alignment signals distrust. We replace telemetry with talking, maps with meetings, and craft with ceremony. And in the worst cases, meetings become a surrogate for trust: a way to stand close enough to the work that leaders feel better, while the work itself suffocates.
Developers, those strange and wonderful creatures whose natural habitat is deep focus, find themselves dragged into open-plan conference rooms to give status on work they aren’t allowed the time to do. Architects lose the golden hours where systems are shaped. Product managers confuse alignment with orchestration. Organisations — believing they’re speeding up — are actually burning through the psychological capital that makes speed possible.
Momentum cannot be summoned by decree. You cannot schedule your way to clarity any more than you can shout a wind turbine into motion. Meetings, used well, can coordinate humans. Used incessantly, they corrode the very conditions under which humans produce meaningful work:
Momentum is not something you mandate. It is something you design for.
And if you want to design for momentum, you must starve the Meeting Golem and restore a developer’s most essential resource: uninterrupted, trusting, autonomous time.
Momentum emerges from trust, clarity, and focus — never from the quantity of meetings
The intention can be good, but the execution can be anathema to any desirable outcomes:
Frequent meetings signal anxiety, not alignment — When leaders don’t trust telemetry or teams, they compensate with rituals.
Context switching is cognitive violence — Every meeting incurs a recovery tax; enough meetings form a cognitive debt spiral.
Meetings erode craft — Deep engineering work requires long, unbroken attention. Meetings can destroy this habitat.
Meetings become a substitute for real system design — If your platform and processes require constant human coordination, they are broken.
Meetings create the illusion of action — Busy calendars look productive but generate zero delivery throughput.
Some practices to consider
1. Protect the Developer Day
Enforce Focus Blocks as sacred.
No meetings before 11:00 AM unless it’s an incident.
Encourage “meeting-free Wednesdays” or “deep-work half days.”
2. Replace Status Meetings with Telemetry
Require dashboards, traces, and work visibility that remove the need for oral updates.
Make “What changed?” answerable without interrogating a human.
3. Default to Asynchronous First
Short written updates, Loom videos, PR comments, decision logs.
Meetings are escalation, not default.
4. Cap Meeting Load
Max 2 hours/day per engineer; max 4 hours/day for managers.
Anything above those thresholds is an organisational smell.
5. Use Meetings Only for What They Are Good At
Creative ideation with constraints
Conflict reconciliation
Real-time decision-making for high-ambiguity topics
Emotional alignment and team bonding
6. Starve the Meeting Golem
Decline unclear invites.
Require agendas with decision outcomes.
Leave meetings that drift.
Make “optional” truly optional.
Some things to avoid
Replacing meetings with noisy chat channels (Slack/Teams spam is not an upgrade).
Overcorrecting into communication starvation — silence is not clarity.
Weaponising async (forcing people to consume walls of text).
Treating developers as infinitely interruptible.
Confusing visibility with surveillance.
Momentum isn’t something you can manufacture by corralling people into rooms and hoping their collective exhaustion somehow alchemises into progress. Real momentum comes from the quiet, disciplined engineering habits that compound: deep focus, clear ownership, honest telemetry, and trust in the people closest to the work.
Used carefully, meetings can clarify, unblock, and align — but when they metastasise, they become a tax on the very cognitive resources that make momentum possible.
So starve the Meeting Golem. Make clarity visible without dragging humans into ritual. Protect deep work like the scarce and precious resource it is. Replace ceremony with craft, noise with signal, pressure with purpose. Momentum arrives when you design for it — when you create the psychological space, technical infrastructure, and organisational trust that allow engineers to move.
When you do that, you don’t need to force momentum. You just need to get out of its way.
“Get out of the way of your developers or lose them to someone who will.” — Adrian Cockroft
You can also catch me on the road at various conferences and events
Further Reading
Team Topologies — Skelton & Pais
The Mythical Man-Month — Frederick P. Brooks, Jnr
Deep Work — Cal Newport