A weekly two-hour meeting with eight people costs roughly a full working month of one person's time every year. Almost nobody calculates this, which is why recurring meetings accumulate and never get cancelled.
- ›Calculating meeting cost
- ›The three meeting types and their rules
- ›What AI genuinely helps with
- ›The quarterly purge
Calculating the cost
Attendees times duration times loaded hourly cost. Do it for your recurring meetings once and the results usually change behavior without any policy being needed.
The more useful version is the opportunity cost: what those people would otherwise be doing. A meeting is worth having when its output beats that alternative, and most recurring meetings have never been tested against it.
The three types and their rules
Decision meetings. People who can decide, options prepared in advance, a decision made in the room. Small, short, and worth having. Rule: if the decision could be made asynchronously, make it asynchronously.
Coordination meetings. Aligning on who does what next. Necessary when work is genuinely interdependent. Rule: if it is a series of individual updates, it should be a document. See automated status reports.
Relationship meetings. One-on-ones, team time, anything whose purpose is the people rather than the output. Rule: do not optimize these away. They are the ones that look inefficient and are not.
Most bad meetings are coordination meetings that should have been documents, or decision meetings without the decision-maker present.
What AI genuinely helps with
Pre-reads assembled from live data, so the meeting starts from facts rather than recitation.
Notes and action capture, so nobody has to choose between participating and recording.
Follow-up detection. A meeting with no subsequent activity is a signal, especially on deals and hiring loops.
Meeting load as capacity. Reading calendar load into planning, so a person with 25 hours of meetings is not planned as fully available. See resource planning with AI.
What AI does not fix: a meeting with no purpose. Better notes on a pointless meeting produce a well-documented waste of time.
The quarterly purge
Recurring meetings accumulate because cancelling one requires someone to decide it is no longer needed, and nobody wants to be that person.
Make it a scheduled event instead. Once a quarter, list every recurring meeting with its cost and ask the organizer to justify it. The ones that cannot be justified end, and ending them is normal rather than a judgment on anyone.
Tip: Set meeting defaults to 25 and 50 minutes rather than 30 and 60. It creates the gap that stops days from cascading, and it costs nothing to adopt.
FAQ
Should we have meeting-free days?
They work for many teams. The failure mode is meetings compressing into the remaining days at higher density, so pair it with a load cap.
What about all-hands meetings?
Relationship and context meetings, and worth having. Keep them infrequent, prepared, and short.
How do we say no to a meeting invitation?
Ask what decision needs making and whether you are needed for it. Most invitations survive that question honestly, and the ones that do not should not have been sent.
Brainis reads calendar load into capacity planning and assembles meeting pre-reads from live data across every module. See Cortex.
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