There is a disease where people add lots of people to meetings that don't really have to be there. Then people have a compulsion to go to every meeting they are invited to.

One of the best decisions I ever made was deciding to stop going to meetings unless I knew I had to. Turns out, nobody really cared, and if they really needed me they could also message me on slack and I can pop in.

I moved jobs recently and this has been a minor issue for me. I get invited to all the meetings, including those where neither my input nor attendance is required, but I don't know that until a few minutes in. At that point I either sit and listen to something barely related to my role or awkwardly drop off.

Except that's not a reasonable ask when you have a global presence and meetings into the evening. Saying no to an over-scheduled calendar is the mechanism by which you gain control of your life.

My measure of a meeting's worth is: if you were shackled to a chair for the scheduled duration of this meeting, would you get anything useful done, from a discussion perspective? If not, simply decline the invite; your brain is not important enough to have been productive in that context.

Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.

When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5.

Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.

A former coworker called these people professional meeters. Had an EM like that. Either he was in a meeting or he was walking around and talking the ear off of whichever unfortunate soul he bumped into. Tangible output was basically 0.

Incredible. I haven't seen a PM that does technical work in years, maybe well over a decade.

Certainly not in most European countries.