How the 25/50 movement was born

This idea came from a simple observation: many teams don't necessarily equate back-to-back meetings with productivity, but they do see meetings as a safe and visible form of work. Being in meetings all day feels busy, structured, and legitimate, even when it leaves little time for focus, reflection, or real progress.

It also came from lived experience. I was exhausted myself, and I kept hearing from others how brutal back-to-back meeting days had become. The pattern was consistent: people were present on calls all day but drained, reactive, and left with little time to think.

The idea behind 25/50 is to treat meeting time as a shared team resource and design it intentionally. By shortening standard meeting blocks to 25 or 50 minutes, teams are encouraged to prioritize what truly needs discussion, come in with clearer agendas, and facilitate conversations more deliberately. Just as importantly, it creates space between meetings for thinking, follow-up, context switching, and movement, which directly improves decision quality and execution.

The 25/50 movement is about reclaiming attention and energy while raising the quality bar for how meetings are run. It emphasizes intentionality: every meeting should have a clear purpose, explicit outcomes, and a reason to exist. Ending meetings early by default introduces natural buffer time for notes, preparation, and short physical breaks. It's a small structural change, but one that helps teams move away from "safe busyness" toward meetings, and work, that are truly purposeful.