How the 25/50 movement was born

The pattern

Many teams don't equate back-to-back meetings with productivity, but they do see meetings as a safe and visible form of work. We complain about them, yet we treat them as inevitable. Being in meetings all day feels busy, structured, and legitimate, even when it leaves little time for focus or real progress.

The breaking point

I lived in that loop for many years. One memory stands out. I was in my fifth or sixth consecutive meeting, a planning session that had no agenda and no clear owner. Half the room was on mute, likely catching up on messages from the meetings they had just left. Someone asked a question that had been answered a few minutes earlier. We spent 40 minutes going in circles, then scheduled a follow-up. That follow-up would land in another wall of back-to-back meetings.

It was the norm, just another day. And that was the problem. The team was drained, reactive, and running on fumes, but no single meeting felt bad enough to cancel. The damage was cumulative, invisible, and accepted.

A shift in perspective

As I grew in my career and started owning outcomes beyond my own work, I began to see meetings differently. A well-planned and managed meeting is one of the best tools we have for communication, and good communication directly shapes results.

My younger self could sit in a meeting physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely, and it didn't feel like a problem. But once I cared about the team's outcomes, not just my own, I realized that every unfocused meeting was a missed opportunity to bring out the best in each other.

The physical cost

Beyond the mental drain on focus and output, I began to feel it physically. My neck, back, shoulders, and wrists ached. Each day, a different part of my body complained from hours of sitting, staring at a screen, and wearing a headset.

What finally woke me up was learning that prolonged sitting is linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic conditions. Research from organizations like the WHO and the American Heart Association has consistently pointed to sedentary behavior as an independent health risk. Depending on how I used it, the five-minute gap between meetings was a health hack.

The first experiment

The idea behind 25/50 is simple: treat meeting time as a shared team asset. By shortening standard meeting blocks to 25 or 50 minutes, teams arrive with sharper agendas and guide conversations more intentionally. Equally important, it creates space between meetings to reflect, refill and move.

I started with my own meetings. I changed my calendar defaults to 25 and 50 minutes and added a one-line note to every invite explaining why. The first few meetings felt awkward. I had to explain why we would finish 5 minutes earlier than a regular meeting. When the 25 minutes were almost up, I had to remind them we would finish early. I wasn't sure if people got it right away but no one ever complained. A few weeks later, people knew we would finish early. They didn't even need the reminder. The rhythm of the meetings shifted. We were more intentional.

What others added

When early adopters started trying 25/50, they also started preparing better, because a shorter meeting punishes a missing agenda. Every meeting had an owner who was responsible for setting clear outcomes. Even 5 minutes doesn't sounds like a lot of time, people had time to reflect and prepare before meetings. Some needed a cup coffee, a stretch, or a walk around the block to feel ready for the next one. What ever it was, they had the time to do it.

None of this required new tools or training. It was a small structural change that surfaced better habits. One person described it as "the easiest culture shift I've ever seen, because it asks for so little."

An invitation

The 25/50 movement is about reclaiming attention and energy together. People across teams and organizations are choosing to schedule 25 or 50 minutes by default, to show up with purpose, and to leave space for reflection and transition. It's a small act that signals something bigger: that we value each other's time enough to protect it.

How we run our meetings says a lot about how much we value the people in them. This is our invitation to do it better, together.