One of the more reliable indicators that a team has drifted from its real task is the proliferation of meetings. Not one or two unnecessary meetings — every organization has those. The signal is a structural proliferation: the meeting that produces the agenda for the next meeting, the standing sync that no one can name the purpose of but everyone feels they need to attend, the working group that was formed to address a problem and continues to meet after the problem has either been solved or revealed to be unsolvable.
This is not primarily a time management problem, although it presents as one. It is a displacement problem. The meeting-as-activity substitutes for the work-as-activity. Attendance produces the sensation of engagement and progress without requiring the group to confront whatever about the real task is uncomfortable — the difficult decision, the constrained resource, the interpersonal conflict that is blocking progress, the honest conversation that nobody has had yet.
Bion observed that groups under anxiety do not simply become less productive. They redirect their energy toward activities that manage the anxiety while maintaining the appearance of engagement. Meeting proliferation is one of the cleanest examples of this in organizational life. It is thoroughly socially acceptable, it generates visible output in the form of notes and action items, and it can continue indefinitely without anyone having to name that it is not producing the actual work.
The diagnostic intervention is simple but uncomfortable: for any meeting that is consuming significant collective time, ask what would happen if it stopped. If the honest answer is that the real work would still happen — through different channels, at different times, without that particular gathering — then the meeting is serving a social or anxiety-management function rather than a task function. That does not mean it should be eliminated immediately. It means the underlying need should be examined.
What does the group need to manage that it is currently managing through convening? That question usually leads somewhere more useful than another calendar audit.