The meeting you can't fix and can't leave

There's a special kind of meeting that's worse than the ones you expect to be a waste of time. It's the meeting you were actually looking forward to.

Maybe it's for a project that's been stuck for weeks. Maybe decisions keep getting deferred. Maybe this meeting felt like the one where things would finally move.

You join with a little optimism. Maybe even a coffee refill. And then, the signs begin...

• "This is mostly just an update." (Okay. Updates can lead to decisions.)
• "For awareness." (That's... less encouraging.)
• "We're not making a decision today." (Interesting thing to say out loud, but thank you for the honesty.)
• "We'll follow up offline." (We will not.)
• "This meeting might end early to give people time back." (Time that could have been given back by not having a meeting.)

At some point, the full realization lands: this meeting could have been an email.

And then the second realization arrives, without mercy: I have to stay.

It's not my meeting, so I can't fix it. My presence is the point, so I can't leave. Which leaves exactly one thing I can do something about — and unfortunately, it's me.

Specifically, it's the internal monologue, which by minute six is running hot: This is a waste of time. Why aren't we deciding anything? This isn't what we need right now. Every lap around that loop confirms the premise and ratchets up the frustration. And here's the problem with frustration loops: they can't audit themselves. Telling yourself to let it go doesn't work, because the voice doing the telling is the same voice doing the complaining.

This is where I've found AI genuinely useful — not to escape the meeting, but to figure out which meeting I'm actually in.

Because here's the reframe that changes everything: the meeting was not a waste. It just was never the meeting I wanted to be in. Meetings like this almost always have a real purpose — it's just not the stated one. So, I give AI the invite and a couple of lines of context, and I ask:

What is this meeting realistically for? Not the agenda — the real purpose. Alignment. Reassurance. Socializing a direction that was already decided somewhere else. Once I know what the meeting is actually doing, I stop waiting for it to do something it was never going to do.

Who needs this meeting to go well? Sometimes it's the most senior person in the room. Sometimes it's a stakeholder who needs to feel heard before they'll stop blocking. That tells me what kind of participation actually matters here.

What's the appropriate level of engagement? Listen. Light participation. Occasional clarification. Not every meeting warrants intensity — and calibrating down isn't checking out. It's matching the meeting that exists instead of the one I imagined.

The answers are rarely surprising. That's not the point. The point is that hearing them from outside my own head works when telling myself doesn't. A neutral voice restating the situation breaks the loop in a way the loop can't break itself.

And once it breaks, something useful happens: I'm free to be fully present. I settle in. I listen for what the meeting is actually about. I contribute in proportion to what it actually is. I leave less irritated than I arrived — which, some days, is a meaningful win.

The meeting still could have been an email. But I stopped reading it like one I was forced to attend, and started reading it like one I'd finally learned to decode.