I hear that all the time...

The truth is scrum doesn’t actually have many meetings. There are four meetings (Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Review & Retrospective) and a 15 minute daily standup. Added up, that’s roughly 8 hours over a three week period. Open your calendar and you will surely see far more meetings than that.

What makes it feel like wasted time is the fact that the whole team attends most of these meetings.

I want to explain why the whole team dynamic is important:

Traditionally, one person understands the whole system and divides the work. This creates a key man risk. Only one person understands the whole system
When the team understands the system, the velocity also increases rapidly over time and bottlenecks are reduced
You get a better solution when the whole team understands the problem
You get better estimates when the whole team breaks down the tasks

Over time, the team will get more efficient at these meetings.