Whenever I hear people talk about meetings and / or (internal / arbitrary) deadlines as a scheduling / productivity tool, I can't shake the thought these people have probably never even heard of concepts like scheduling optimization, bottleneck / queing theory, or async event-loop pipelines.

Deadlines don't make things more efficient by definition, unless it's a case of "within-task" inefficiency (i.e. "laziness"). But while this is almost always assumed to be the case by managers, it almost never is the case on the ground. And then you get into this hare-brained vicious cycle of "oh we're falling behind despite the deadlines (read "context-switching interruptions with non-trivial overhead enforcing suboptimal task selection"), we should probably add more!" [facepalm]