The need to attend an endless number of meetings causes us to disengage faster than a sweet-toothed hungry child chasing an ice cream van. It can suck the soul out of us and often ends up being as enjoyable as root canal surgery.

We have all been part of the drill.

We stagger into the boardroom with our colleagues. A few key people speak and make decisions while others are lost in space thinking about what they want for lunch. You watch as one or two of your colleagues stab their leg with a sharp pencil to prevent themselves from screaming - or falling asleep - during a particularly boring session.

Now a new international report, The State of Meetings 2019, involving 6500 working professionals, has cast a massive storm cloud over the entire meeting agenda by confirming what many of us long suspected - too much of our working week is chewed up with countless and purposeless meetings.

In one of the most comprehensive surveys on the topic of all time, 44 per cent of respondents said they lost valuable time because of unnecessary meetings. Staggeringly, 43 per cent claimed that rather than providing clear direction, meetings often left them more confused.

In fairness, a certain number of office meetings are needed to keep people informed and to facilitate decision-making - and some bosses do lead meetings exceptionally well.

In fact, some meetings can be purposeful, motivating and even morale-boosting. Yet those types of meetings are few and far between in the majority of workplaces.

More often than not, the meeting mania that has pervaded many organisations takes up too much time, produces too few results and causes workplace productivity to disappear faster than a hairpiece in a hurricane.

The list of complaints from workers feeling they are marinating in misery because of meeting mania is endless: there are too many meetings or they are too long, their purpose is unclear or there are no agendas, the meeting is overcrowded, the wrong people are in attendance, one or two colleagues steal the show, attendees arrive late, people talk in circles, conversations veer off track, colleagues are being cut off mid-sentence, people are checking their phones or playing on their laptops, and hefty doses of analysis paralysis are triggered by endless debates rather than decisions.

Yet despite the undisguised contempt for this work activity, experts believe that meeting madness is on the rise. Impotent bosses are jumping on the bandwagon even though our ever-evolving technology has provided a veritable smorgasbord of more efficient alternatives.

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You see, our ineffective bosses - call them "meetheads" - continue to iconise office meetings for all the wrong reasons.

Take the malevolent manager who schedules innumerable meetings to create an illusion of inclusion.

Then there is the insecure boss who routinely summons all and sundry to office gatherings to bark out orders to protect their turf and to reinforce their position as top dog.

Let's not forget those micromanagers who simply cannot resist the temptation to call meetings to scrutinise and control even the most diligent of workers.

And most workers are only too familiar with those escapee bosses who spend their entire working days flitting from one meeting to another explaining they have back-to-backs. In doing so they create a mirage of miraculous effectiveness despite the reality that those meetheads are often simply avoiding the tough work by warming a seat.

The bottom line is that we will never completely get away from the adverse meeting culture that pervades many workplaces.

But remember that we can always get more done with fewer meetings that are run well.