How important are meetings?

If 80% of your calendar is booked with meetings then you might want to review how you schedule your days. I understand that the more senior a manager is in an organization he or she will have to be more aligned with other teams and hence will need to meet more often. Nevertheless if the alignment takes around 80% of your time something might need to be adjusted. How do you decide in which cases you need to have a meeting? Do you have more "FYI" or "decision focused" meetings? Is the planned meeting time a good use of time for all participants? Does your company culture measure your importance based on how many meetings you are invited to? Are you delegating enough tasks to your team? It makes sense to thoroughly check why you go to that many meetings in order to free up more time. In order to do more great work you need to have some time to do this great work. One of the major risks I see with an excessive amount of meetings is that it gets very hard to innovate and be creative. Many leadership tasks are based on creative problem solving. My question to you is how do you do that on an ongoing basis if you don't find enough time? Many meetings just drain energy out of you. You can and probably have to do that for certain periods of time but you should not give in to that on a permanent basis. Review your schedule and only keep the meetings that you really need to achieve your desired outcomes.