Way too many other meetings. Meetings all the time.

There was a nice period where we had 2 meetings a week. One team meeting, then one social happy hour meeting with just the devs and no manager. (Mostly so we could complain about the manager, but general social bonding also). We also did plenty of ad-hoc meetings as needed, but generally the two regularly scheduled ones struck a good balance of getting things done without wasting time.

In hindsight, that manager could be a difficult person to work with, but the overall balance of trade-offs was way better with him than it is now. Very few, very efficient meetings, were one of the positive tradeoffs for sure.