What is Gresham's law in simple terms?

Gresham's law is an economic principle—named after 16th-century financier Thomas Gresham—that says "bad money drives out good." When two forms of currency are forced to share the same legal value but one is actually worth more, people spend the lesser one and hoard the better one, so the good money disappears from circulation. The idea now applies to almost any system where unequal things are priced the same, from coins to calendars.

How does Gresham's law apply to meetings?

In the Gresham's law of meetings, every calendar slot is "priced" in time, so a low-value status sync and a high-value working session both cost the same hour. Because bad meetings are cheaper and safer to schedule, they multiply and crowd out deep work—and the more valuable activity gets "hoarded" into early mornings and nights. In short, bad meetings drive out good work.

Why do bad meetings drive out good work?

Because the system overvalues them. Scheduling a meeting is nearly free for the organizer, attendance looks like contribution, and recurring meetings resist cancellation. Deep work, by contrast, is invisible and demands an uninterrupted block. When the low-value option is cheaper and more socially rewarded, it wins by default—the same "survival advantage" that lets bad money beat good.

How do you stop having too many meetings?

Reprice them. Require an agenda and a clear outcome on every invite, cap default lengths, and give people the right to decline purposeless meetings. Protect peak focus hours—like 9–11 a.m.—as no-meeting time, and move status updates to async. The goal isn't zero meetings; it's making sure the ones that survive actually produce value.

Gresham's Law of Meetings: When Bad Drives Out Good

In 1558, an English financier named Thomas Gresham noticed something strange about money. When two coins are forced to share the same face value but one holds more real worth, people spend the cheap coin and quietly hoard the valuable one. The good money vanishes from circulation. Economists later named the pattern Gresham's law: bad money drives out good.

Your calendar runs on the exact same principle. Every meeting carries the same nominal "value"—a 30-minute block is a 30-minute block—but their real worth is wildly unequal. A focused working session can move a project forward by a week. A vague status sync produces nothing but the feeling of progress. When both cost the same to schedule, guess which one multiplies?

This is the Gresham's law of meetings, and it explains why your week keeps filling with sessions nobody needed. In a Harvard Business Review survey of 182 senior managers, 65% said meetings keep them from finishing their own work, and 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. The bad coin is winning. What looks like simple meeting overload is really an economic law in disguise—the daily battle of deep work vs meetings, decided entirely by price. Here's how the mechanism works, and how to put good work back into circulation.

What Gresham's law actually says

Gresham's law is one of the oldest ideas in economics. Britannica boils it down to five words: "bad money drives out good." The classic setup is a kingdom circulating two coins of equal legal value—one full of silver, one debased. Because the law forces them to trade at par, rational people spend the debased coin and melt down or hoard the silver one. Within months, only bad money is left in your pocket.

The insight outgrew currency a long time ago. As Farnam Street explains it, once bad behavior gains a "survival advantage" over good behavior, "it becomes difficult, and occasionally impossible, to drive out the bad." Anywhere two things are forced to compete at the same price while delivering different value, the cheaper one wins by default. That's not cynicism. It's arithmetic.

Meetings are a near-perfect case. They're denominated in time, the most rigid currency there is. An hour is an hour whether it's spent shipping a feature or watching twelve people read a slide aloud. The market can't reprice the hour, so it does the next best thing: it produces more of whatever is cheapest to make. On a calendar, that's the meeting.

Why your calendar obeys the Gresham's law of meetings

Scheduling a bad meeting is almost free. You click a few names, pick a slot, and the cost lands on everyone else. Deep work is expensive: it demands an uninterrupted block, real preparation, and the nerve to decline an invite. So the cheap thing floods the market and the valuable thing gets hoarded—squeezed into early mornings, late nights, and the cracks between calls.

The data shows the hoarding in real time. The average knowledge worker now gets only two to three hours of genuine deep work a day, according to Hubstaff's 2026 tracking data. Meanwhile, Asana found that the typical worker burns 103 hours a year in meetings they call unnecessary, and spends 60% of their time on "work about work" rather than the job itself. Good currency, hoarded. Bad currency, everywhere.

It gets worse when you look at *when* the bad meetings land. Microsoft's Work Trend Index found that half of all meetings happen during the 9–11 a.m. and 1–3 p.m. windows—precisely the hours when focus is sharpest. The same research clocks the average worker getting interrupted 275 times a day. The cheap coin isn't just more common; it's actively colonizing the slots where good work would have happened, then fragmenting whatever survives. That fragmentation has its own price tag, which is why the real cost of context switching dwarfs the meeting invite that triggered it.

How bad meetings get "overvalued"

For Gresham's law to bite, the bad coin has to be overvalued by the system. Calendars do this beautifully. A recurring status meeting is socially safe, visible to your manager, and requires zero output—attendance itself counts as contribution. Deep work is invisible. Nobody sees the two hours you spent thinking; they see the meeting you skipped.

Picture a twelve-person product team's Monday. The weekly all-hands, the project sync, the "quick" pre-read review, and the recap that follows each one are all on the calendar by default—they renew themselves automatically and never get questioned. The two hours an engineer needs to actually design the feature? That has to be carved out by hand, defended, and usually sacrificed the moment a "quick sync" lands on top of it. The bad coins arrive pre-minted. The good coin has to be forged every single day.

So bad meetings earn a survival advantage. They reproduce—one sync spawns a follow-up, a pre-read, and a recap. They resist cancellation, because removing a meeting feels riskier than keeping it. And they spread across time zones: Microsoft reports that meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16% year over year, and nearly a third now span multiple time zones. The bad coin is being minted around the clock, on every continent. The result is a workplace where being *in* meetings reads as being valuable, while the valuable work happens in the margins—if it happens at all. When 71% of managers call meetings unproductive yet keep scheduling them, you're not looking at a discipline problem. You're looking at a monetary one, and it shows up directly in the true cost of your meetings.

How to put good work back into circulation

Countries fix Gresham's law by reforming the currency—demonetizing the bad coin so the good one can circulate again. You can do the same to your calendar. The goal isn't zero meetings. It's repricing them so value, not convenience, decides what survives.

Raise the cost of scheduling

The core problem is that bad meetings are too cheap to create. Make them expensive. Require an agenda and a desired outcome on every invite—no agenda, no meeting. Cap default lengths at 25 minutes instead of 30 or 60. Give everyone a standing right to decline a meeting with no clear purpose. When scheduling actually costs something, far fewer bad coins get minted.

Protect the peak windows

Since half of all meetings invade the sharpest focus hours, fence those hours off. Block 9–11 a.m. for deep work across the team, or adopt no-meeting days. Treat that protected time as legal tender that simply can't be spent on a status sync. This is the highest-leverage move you can make, because it stops the bad coin from colonizing the good coin's territory—and it's the only reliable way to grow your team's daily deep-work hours.

Default to async

Most status meetings exist to transfer information, and async tools do that better and cheaper. A written update or a recorded walkthrough lets people consume it during their own shallow-work windows instead of stealing a focus block. The more you lean on async communication, the less the calendar has to carry—and the fewer chances Gresham's law gets to operate.

Make a working session ≠ a status meeting

Not every meeting is bad money. A real working session—where a decision gets made or work actually gets produced—is the good coin you want to protect. The trap is letting it trade at par with a passive status update, as if the two were interchangeable. They aren't. Name the difference out loud, schedule accordingly, and stop spending working-session energy on broadcasts.

Make the meetings you keep actually mint value

Reforming the currency thins the herd, but the meetings that survive still have to be worth their face value. That's the bar: a meeting should produce something—a decision, a design, a shared artifact—not just a transcript.

This is the problem Coommit was built for. By putting an interactive canvas and a context-aware AI directly inside the call, a Coommit session is designed to produce output, not just talk: the whiteboard, the decisions, and the action items all live in one place the moment the call ends. A meeting that leaves real work behind is good money. And the fewer status syncs you keep, the more room there is for sessions like that—which is the entire point of demonetizing the bad coin in the first place.

The deeper shift is cultural. Once a team treats focus time as its scarcest currency and meetings as something that must earn their slot, the Gresham's law of meetings starts running in reverse: good work, protected and visible, begins to drive out the bad.

The bottom line

Gresham's law was never really about coins. It's about what happens when a system forces unequal things to trade at an equal price—the cheap thing wins, every time, unless someone changes the rules. Your calendar is exactly that system, and right now the rules favor the meeting that costs nothing to schedule and produces nothing in return. The fix isn't heroic willpower; it's repricing. Raise the cost of bad meetings, protect the hours where good work happens, and insist that every session you keep mints real value. Do that, and the good money comes back into circulation. Your best work stops hiding in the margins—and starts showing up on the calendar where it belongs.