Say No to a Meeting Invite Today
Your job isn't to answer emails
I was fresh out of school and still very new to the corporate world. I had just presented my status update for the previous day where I had gotten my inbox down to zero and returned correspondence back to various partners in the organization. So, naturally feeling big and important I told the team I had, "Cleared my inbox to zero and gotten back to everyone."
My manager took me aside and told me, "Your job isn't to answer emails."
Another mentor once told me, "If you ever feel you aren't adding value to a meeting, then get up and leave."
It's a common problem with folks who are recent graduates. They wait for a work pipeline to arrive. This is because for the past decade they've been fed a to-do list at school or at jobs they've worked to help pay for school.
This all evaporates when you arrive in the corporate workplace, for the most part. There's still things that have to get done, but you quickly realize that the whole thing gets more ambiguous and fuzzy the more you look at it.
Thus, many people devolve into the simplest way of burning down a to-do list. If I have Jira tickets in my queue, then I have work. If I have emails, then I have work. Again, for some jobs, this is absolutely the case. But, for many others, your job description isn't "work the Jira ticket queue to zero," or "attend every meeting you're sent," or "answer all my emails." Your job, if you work at a corporation, is to generate value for the corporation using your given skills and to learn new skills to generate more value. This is then boiled into whatever niche you work in - analyst, engineer, project manager, etc.
My point being, if you want to level up your corporate career, impress your boss and their boss, and avoid going crazy with work overwhelming life, then start with what needs to be done and work backwards to what you need to do to accomplish it. Sometimes that is attending a meeting and sometimes it is not.