Gone For Good

Given that we each only have around 8,700 hours each year, including sleep, none of us needs telling that meetings are a by and large a waste of time. But even so, it's a little alarming to learn just how much time they can waste. A review found that on average a planned one hour meeting will often run to two or more hours, this taken with pre meeting preparation can mean that a one hour meeting consumes four + hours of your time. Throw in post meeting chit chat and you can be in the realms of five hours.
One meeting a month, sixty hours a year, two and a half days of your life you won’t get back.
I had three meetings today, two more planned for the remainder of the week.

It would be hard to invent a worse system for reaching decisions than the modern meeting. For a start, there's evidence to suggest – as you expected – that it's the over confident loud talkers who get their way, not the most knowledgeable attendees. Items higher up the agenda get more attention regardless of their importance.
Meetings are also a fertile setting for Parkinson's Law of Trivilality, otherwise known as the “Bike Shed Effect”. Attendees often don’t speak up about the big, complex, important decisions, because they're wary of embarrassing themselves but they still want to appear as if they're making a contribution, so they'll make sure to weigh in on the unimportant stuff instead, this means triviality comes to dominate.
One meeting of today clearly demonstrated The Parkinson Effect; “where a decision about the construction of a new bike shed "will be debated for an hour and a quarter, then deferred for decision to the next meeting, pending the gathering of more information".

Either way that’s hours of my life I won’t get back.

To conclude; the only thing that worries me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I hope we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble

Paddy, have taken up residence with Sam clearly feels the same way about the day!