A Celebration of Circular Agendas, Action Items with No Owners, and the Infinite Loop of Workplace Inefficiency

It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday and your calendar chimes. You join the Zoom. You wait. Others trickle in. Cameras off. Spirits lower.

The title of the meeting?
“Process Alignment Sync: Phase Two Planning – Roundtable”

The purpose? Unclear.
The outcome? None.
The vibe? Existential.

Welcome to the Meeting About Meetings, a recurring staple of corporate life where we gather not to do, but to discuss doing, possibly later, with someone else, via a follow-up email no one will ever open.

Let’s unpack this beloved time-waster and explore why it persists like an open-air construction site that never actually builds anything.

Step 1: Scheduling the Meeting to Discuss Scheduling

Before the meeting can happen, a meeting must be proposed. But first — what time works?

Cue the dance of the Doodle poll.

After 12 rounds of rescheduling, someone lands a coveted 11:15 a.m. slot on a Wednesday. It’s:

• Too late for real work
• Too early for lunch
• Just awkward enough to disrupt everyone’s flow

Perfect.

Step 2: The Agenda That Raises More Questions Than It Answers

A good meeting about meetings must include an agenda that:

• Is distributed 4 minutes before the meeting
• Has at least one bullet point titled “Other”
• Contains phrases like “circle back,” “actionable next steps,” and “define deliverables”

If anyone asks for clarification, they are thanked for “raising an important point” and then quietly ignored.

Step 3: The Meeting Itself — A Symphony of Soft Chaos

The meeting begins as all great meetings do: with the host saying, “Let’s give it another minute.”

Eventually, someone named Linda offers to “kick things off.” The team proceeds to:

• Revisit last week’s unresolved questions
• Introduce five new unresolved questions
• Mutually agree to punt all decisions to the next meeting

At least three people say, “Just to build on that…” before repeating the same point with different adjectives.

No one takes notes, but someone opens a Google Doc titled “Q2 Planning Thoughts (Draft – Do Not Edit).”

Step 4: The Great Action Item Illusion

As the 60-minute mark approaches, panic sets in. Something must be captured. Something must be assigned.

So action items are created — glorious, ambiguous, beautifully untraceable:

• “Align with stakeholders”
• “Sync with Dev on bandwidth”
• “Circle back post-handoff”

Each item is assigned to either “TBD,” “The Team,” or “We.”

This ensures no accountability while maintaining the appearance of momentum.

Step 5: The Follow-Up Email No One Will Read

Within 30 minutes of the meeting ending, an email is sent with the subject line: “Re: Today’s Sync – Next Steps and Summary”

It includes:

• A recap of everything that wasn’t decided
• A list of action items copy-pasted from the chat
• A new invite to a follow-up meeting two weeks later

Attachments include a spreadsheet no one opened and a PDF agenda for a meeting that already happened.

Final Thoughts: The Meeting Is the Message

Meetings about meetings don’t exist to move work forward. They exist to signal that work might eventually move forward. They are the corporate version of revving the engine while the car is in park.

So the next time you’re in a meeting about a planning meeting that was created during a strategy meeting that came out of a postmortem from a project that never launched — take heart.

You’re not alone.
You’re just in the eternal feedback loop of collaborative futility.
And your calendar will never be empty again.