Why Most Meetings Waste Time: Elon Musk’s Six Rules and What I Learned

There was a time, quite a while ago, when I believed that hierarchy and the meeting structures that came with it were simply part of growing a serious company. If a company grew, you needed managers. If you had managers, you needed management meetings. If you had management meetings, you needed structures, processes, updates, evaluations and all the other things that make people feel as if a company is becoming more professional.

During a period of rapid growth in my own company, I agreed to introduce management layers. Before I knew it, direct communication became something almost suspicious. Heaven forbid if I spoke directly to someone on the shop floor, or if someone from the shop floor came directly to me. That was no longer how things were supposed to work. Everything had to go through the right manager, the right layer, the right meeting and the right process.

What I got in return was a calendar full of meetings.

Financial meetings, culture meetings, structure meetings, evaluation meetings, strategy meetings, process meetings and, of course, meetings to discuss why previous meetings had not produced enough clarity. At some point, the organization started to feel busy with itself. People were talking about the work, structuring the work, reporting on the work and planning new meetings about the work, but less and less attention seemed to go to the actual work and the customer.

I think I lasted about a month.

Then I decided to dissolve the entire management team and banned meetings with more than two people. Looking back, I can admit that this may have been a little radical. My temperament was slightly less polished back then. But the lesson stayed with me. Meetings are not automatically a sign of professionalism. Sometimes they are a sign that ownership, communication and decision-making have become unclear.

That is why I understand the spirit behind the meeting rules often attributed to Elon Musk. Whether you like his style or not is not really the point here. The point is that his rules challenge something many organizations tolerate far too easily: unnecessary complexity disguised as collaboration.

Bad Meetings Are Usually a Symptom

A bad meeting is rarely just a bad meeting. It is usually a symptom of something deeper. Maybe no one really owns the decision. Maybe people are afraid to communicate directly. Maybe hierarchy has become more important than progress. Maybe people want to be involved because involvement feels like importance. Or maybe the organization has confused talking about responsibility with actually taking it.

That is the real danger of meeting culture. It can feel productive while quietly removing people from the work that creates value. A full calendar looks serious from the outside, but it often hides a lack of clarity. If everyone is busy talking, reporting, aligning and preparing, it can take a while before someone notices that the customer is not being served better, the product is not improving faster and decisions are not being made more clearly.

For me, a meeting should create at least one of three things: clarity, ownership or a decision. If it does not create any of those, there is a good chance it should not exist.

Elon Musk’s Six Meeting Rules

Below are six meeting rules often attributed to Elon Musk, with my own view added from experience. I do not think every company should copy Tesla, SpaceX or Musk’s management style. That would be a lazy conclusion. But I do think these rules force a useful question: are your meetings helping the work, or have they started replacing the work?

1. Avoid Large Meetings

Stay away from large meetings unless you are sure they add value for everyone involved.

Large meetings often look inclusive, but in practice they can become slow-motion productivity killers. People sit there listening to things that do not concern them, waiting for the two minutes that might be relevant. The larger the meeting, the easier it becomes for responsibility to disappear into the group. Everyone was present, so everyone feels informed, but no one necessarily feels responsible.

Of course, there are moments when a large meeting makes sense. A company-wide update can be useful. A shared crisis may require everyone to hear the same message. A major strategic change can need collective alignment. But most large meetings are not like that. Most large meetings are large because nobody has made the effort to decide who really needs to be there.

In my opinion, any meeting with more than five people is already suspicious. Not always wrong, but suspicious. The question should be simple: does every person in this meeting need to contribute, decide or understand something that cannot be handled better in another way? If the answer is no, make the meeting smaller. Less audience. More ownership.

2. Leave a Meeting if You Are Not Contributing

Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call if it is clear you are not adding value. It is not rude to leave. It is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

We have all been in meetings where you know after five minutes that you are not needed. You sit politely, nod occasionally and pretend to listen while your mind starts answering emails internally, planning groceries or wondering how adults have collectively agreed to keep this ritual alive. We call it professional behaviour, but often it is just obedience dressed up as manners.

If your presence does not help the meeting, and the meeting does not help your work, leaving should be normal. You do not need to make a dramatic statement. You can simply say, “I do not think I am needed for this part, so I am going to step out and use the time elsewhere.” That is not rude. That is respectful. Respectful of your own time, but also of the purpose of the meeting.

Time is not a social decoration. It is life. So if you are not contributing, go and do something that actually matters.

3. Forget the Hierarchy

Communication should follow the shortest path needed to get the job done.

This may be the most important rule. Hierarchical communication often looks organized, but it can easily create delay, ego and distortion. Someone on the floor sees a problem, tells a supervisor, who tells a manager, who raises it in another meeting, after which someone eventually asks the person who saw the problem in the first place what actually happened.

That is not structure. That is organizational theatre.

If something needs to be solved, the shortest useful route should be allowed. If a developer needs to speak to someone in customer support, let them. If operations needs to talk directly to finance, let them. If a founder needs an answer from the person who actually knows the answer, let that conversation happen. Hierarchy should clarify responsibility, not block reality.

Managers who need every message to pass through them often do not protect the organization. They protect their position. And when hierarchy becomes more important than truth, the customer eventually pays the price. The work needs to get done. It should not get stuck in a bureaucratic maze.

4. Be Clear, Not Clever

Communication should be simple, direct and understandable.

This sounds obvious, but many organizations are full of people trying to sound intelligent instead of trying to be understood. They use abstract language, complex slides, strategic fog and corporate phrases that make simple things look impressive. But if people need three follow-up meetings to understand what you meant, you were not communicating. You were decorating confusion.

Clarity is not the enemy of intelligence. It is often the proof of it. Say what you mean. Use normal words. Define the problem. Name the decision. Make clear who owns what. Avoid jargon unless everyone in the room genuinely understands it. And if you cannot explain the point simply, there is a good chance you do not understand it well enough yet.

Cleverness often creates performance. Clarity creates progress.

5. Stop Having Frequent Meetings

If you want to know where your team’s productivity is going, look at the number of meetings in the calendar.

The more often people meet by default, the less they tend to prepare, decide and act. A weekly meeting can easily become a ritual. People show up because it is Tuesday, not because there is a real reason to meet. That may seem harmless, but it changes behaviour. People start waiting for the meeting to raise issues. They delay decisions until the meeting. They stop solving small problems directly because “we can discuss it next week.”

That is how a meeting culture slows down an organization without anyone really noticing.

Regular meetings are not always wrong. Some rhythms help teams stay aligned. But the question must stay alive: does this meeting still have a purpose? If there is no decision to make, no real issue to solve and no important alignment needed, cancel it. Send a short update. Record a quick message. Speak directly to the one person who needs to know.

A meeting should not exist just because it existed last week.

6. Use Common Sense

Always let common sense be your guide. If following a company rule is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, the rule should change.

This rule sounds almost too simple, but it is surprisingly rare in many organizations. People follow processes long after those processes have stopped making sense. They keep forms, approvals, reports and meetings alive because “that is how we do it here.” Somehow, common sense becomes almost rebellious.

But common sense should not be controversial.

If a rule slows down the work without protecting quality, safety, trust or clarity, question it. If a process exists only because no one has dared to remove it, remove it. If a meeting adds no value but survives because it is politically convenient, cancel it. You are not at work to tick off checklists. You are there to create value, solve problems, serve customers, lead people, make decisions and improve what needs to be improved.

A company that cannot use common sense without permission has a leadership problem.

What These Rules Really Say About Leadership

At first glance, these six rules are about meetings. But underneath, they are really about leadership. They ask whether people are allowed to think for themselves. Whether direct communication is trusted. Whether time is respected. Whether clarity matters more than status. Whether ownership is real or only discussed. Whether rules serve the work, or the other way around.

That is why meeting culture reveals so much about an organization.

A company with too many meetings often has too little trust, too little ownership and too little clarity. Too many people are waiting for permission. Too many leaders are hiding behind structure. Too many decisions are softened, delayed or spread across a group until nobody can be held responsible anymore.

Good leaders do not create endless meetings to feel in control. They create conditions in which people can do their work, communicate honestly and make decisions without unnecessary friction. The best meeting culture is not anti-meeting. It is anti-waste.

Meetings Are Not the Enemy

To be clear, I am not against meetings. Some meetings are essential. A good meeting can solve something in twenty minutes that would otherwise take two weeks of confusing email threads. A good meeting can create alignment, repair misunderstanding, make decisions and bring energy back into a team.

But a good meeting has a reason. It has the right people. It has a clear purpose. It has someone who owns the outcome. It ends with decisions, actions or clarity. And if it does not need to happen, it does not happen.

That is the difference. A bad meeting fills time. A good meeting changes what happens next.

Why Coffee Chats Often Work Better Than Formal Meetings

There is another side to this. While I dislike endless formal meetings, I strongly believe in informal conversations. Coffee chats, spontaneous check-ins and personal contact can do more for collaboration than many official meetings. They build trust. They create context. They help people understand each other beyond roles and tasks. They make it easier to call someone directly when something matters.

Many studies point toward the value of informal communication for agility, collaboration and innovation. That makes sense. Organizations are not machines. They are networks of people. And people work better together when they know each other as humans, not only as calendar invites.

Even in remote teams, this matters. I have worked with business partners who live 1.5 and 9 hours away. We may see each other face-to-face only a few times a year, but we speak almost daily by video. Most of our conversations are about deadlines, work and decisions. But that other 10 percent is pure gold. Formula 1. A dog. A family story. A joke. A small frustration. A random thought.

Those moments may look inefficient from the outside, but they often make the real work smoother. They reduce friction, create trust and make difficult conversations easier when they are needed. So no, the answer is not to remove all human contact. The answer is to stop confusing formal meetings with meaningful connection.

My Own Meeting Rule

If I had to reduce all of this to one rule, it would be this:

A meeting should create clarity, ownership or a decision. If it does not, it should probably be a conversation, a message or nothing at all.

Not every issue needs a meeting. Not every update needs a room. Not every opinion needs an audience. Not every process needs a ritual. Sometimes the best thing you can do for productivity is not to optimize the meeting, but to cancel it.

Final Thought: Work Should Not Disappear Into Meetings

Meetings can be useful, but they become dangerous when they start replacing the work they were supposed to support. If your organization spends more time discussing work than doing work, something is wrong. If people need permission to speak to the person who can actually solve the problem, something is wrong. If everyone is busy but customers are not better served, something is wrong.

A full calendar is not the same as progress.

Real progress usually looks simpler. A clear conversation. A direct question. A fast decision. A small team. A person taking ownership. Someone saying what needs to be said without hiding behind structure.

That is where work starts moving again.

And if a meeting helps that happen, have the meeting. If it does not, leave it alone.