Meeting overbooking

Overbooking is what happens when the metric being celebrated is meetings booked and nobody owns meetings survived. A diary of twelve consecutive twenty-minute meetings looks like a triumph in the pre-event report and plays out as a forced march: by meeting eight the participant is answering on autopilot, by ten they're skipping slots to eat, and the exhibitors holding those late slots paid the same as the ones who got the buyer fresh. The damage is asymmetric too — the overbooked person burns out once, but every counterpart in their diary experiences the decay. Schedulers enable this because they optimize feasibility, not stamina; software will happily fill every slot the calendar allows unless someone configures limits. The practical guardrails are unglamorous: caps on meetings per person per day, mandatory buffer minutes between slots, protected lunch breaks, and walking-time rules when meetings span locations — then a human review of the fullest diaries before schedules go out, because the busiest diaries belong to your most valuable participants. The common mistake is letting hosted buyer quotas and exhibitor demand stack without a ceiling, since every individual request looks reasonable. One honest nuance: some participants overbook themselves deliberately, planning to triage on site — which is their right, but their silent cancellations become your no-show statistics, so cap what you're accountable for.