The message arrives at 4:52pm. “Got five mins for a quick sync tomorrow?” No agenda. No context. Only a smiley face, which is how executioners sign off now.
You will go through the following stages. Everyone does. Some people go through them every week until they’re carried out.
Stage One: Denial
You tell yourself it really will be quick. It says quick. Grown adults would not use “quick” lightly. You accept. It’s booked for thirty minutes. You notice. You decide not to notice. That’s the same muscle you use to ignore your pension statement.
Stage Two: Anxiety
A sync with no agenda is either nothing or the end of your career. You spend the evening replaying every email since March. You find a typo in a subject line. You draft a resignation letter, then a list of everything you’d do differently with your twenties. Too late. The sync is at ten.
No agenda is not a lack of information. It is information, and it’s about you.
Stage Three: The Sync Itself
It’s about a spreadsheet column. Should it be “Status” or “Current Status”? Three more people join “just to listen”. One is clearly driving. One is clearly crying. The meeting ends with no decision and a promise to “circle back”. You lost a night’s sleep to a column header. The column header is fine.
Stage Four: Multiplication
A follow-up is booked to discuss the outcomes of the sync. Also “quick”. Someone creates “Sync Notes v1”. Within a week there’s a v4 and a channel. The column is still called “Status”. The person who asked for the original sync has left. Nobody stopped the meetings. Nobody knows how.
Stage Five: Acceptance
The quick sync is now a recurring weekly meeting. It has a name. It has an emoji. It has outlived the project, two of its founders and a reorg. You attend every Tuesday. You have stopped asking why. You’ve started sending your own “quick sync” invites to younger colleagues, at 4:52pm, with a smiley face.
That is how it spreads. That is how you become the thing that happened to you.