*[I found several questions to reject meetings in special situations, but not a general one. So I'm asking this.]*

I'm infected with meeting overload. Meetings often take up 80% of my weekly working hours. I don't have enough time to execute discussed actions. At this point there is no other solution than just rejecting meetings. I cannot take things off-line or take initiative otherwise. 

**I need a quick way to reject many meetings without upsetting people.**

I thought about setting up a standard response which explains the situation, but I'm still searching for a good wording. On one side I don't want to create the impression that I don't value their work, on the other side I want to avoid that my explanation is used to argue why I really need to join this one time.

*Out Of Scope*

* We're just too few people to handle the work, that can't be changed in short term.
* I know which meetings to reject. These meetings probably wouldn't changed much, if I don't attend. Often they have an informational character and I would be fine to read the summary. No advice is needed here.
* I already read other posts about general strategies to avoid meetings. Here I want to focus on rejecting completely.