A trap that I've been caught in repeatedly over the years is the 10AM, 3PM daily standing meeting pattern, which is almost uniquely capable of preventing any actual work from being done.

It often manifests as an Agile/Scrum standup at 10AM that balloons into an hour-long status meeting. This effect worsens as people start to treat that meeting as the beginning of the work-day, and increasingly show up later, and more unprepared.

Then, after that meeting completes, there is a brief flurry to handle any follow-ups generated by the morning meetings, and then it is lunch time.

People drag back in from lunch, and maybe handle some responses from their pre-lunch follow-ups, and then it is time for the standing afternoon meeting. Usually this just recapitulates everything that was discussed in the morning, since no one has had any time to actually do anything. By the time it finally wraps up at 4:30 PM, everyone's brains have utterly dissolved, and they go home.

And then it starts again.