After stepping up to the management ladder my meeting count went drastically up. Last year I spent over half of my working time sitting (or standing, or walking) in the meetings. Rest of the time, when I wasn't in a meeting I was mostly either preparing for a meeting or recapping from previous one.
Sure it is major part of my job, major part of the leadership to listen and talk to the people. I don't even mind doing that, but I sure would have other things to do as well.
But it's not just me. I can live with doing nothing but meetings. To ensure I know what's going on in my teams and around the company, and also make sure they hear and understand my visions. My value is generated by attending on those meetings. But for most of those people sitting there it's actually away from their value generation time. Instead of sitting in endless meetings they should (and want) to be designing and writing software.
I already started cutting down the meetings that I had booked last year. This year I'll try to focus more on having more focused one on one discussions instead. It's anyway a mich better form for the listening part when the person in question gets my full focus.