A weekly 60 minute meeting with 10 people costs 40 person-hours a month. That is one person's full work week, every month, spent in a single meeting.
Run that arithmetic on every recurring meeting your team runs and the number gets uncomfortable fast.
The Meeting Standard: A No-Nonsense System for Running Meetings That Don't Waste Everyone's Time (The Professional Standards Series, Book 4) has a chapter on recurring meeting audits. The chapter starts with the cost calculation, because most managers have never done it. They run a meeting because it is on the calendar. They never asked what it costs.
Why recurring meetings do not die
Recurring meetings do not die when they stop being useful. They persist because of organizational inertia, and organizational inertia is very strong.
Nobody owns the meeting. The person who called it moved to a different role. The project it served ended eight months ago. But the meeting was never formally canceled, so it keeps happening.
Canceling feels awkward. To cancel a meeting, someone has to admit it is not useful. That feels like criticizing the people who have been attending it, the person who started it, or the purpose it was supposed to serve.
Partial value confuses people. The meeting is not completely useless. Something gets discussed. Occasionally something useful surfaces. So nobody is sure if it is okay to cancel it.
The meeting is easier than the alternative. Canceling the meeting means someone needs to figure out another way to accomplish whatever the meeting was nominally doing. That is more work than just letting the meeting continue.
All of these are real dynamics. None of them are good reasons to keep a meeting that has outlived its purpose.
The meeting audit: three steps
The book's meeting audit is a systematic review of your recurring meetings to evaluate whether each one should continue, be redesigned, or be eliminated. The recommendation is to run it quarterly for a team that is actively managing their meeting load, and at minimum once a year.
The audit has three steps.
Step 1: The inventory.
List every recurring meeting your team runs. Not ad hoc meetings, just recurring ones. For each meeting, capture: name and frequency, original purpose, current attendee list, and time cost (frequency multiplied by duration multiplied by attendees equals total person-hours per month).
That last line is the one most managers have never run. A weekly 60 minute meeting with 10 people costs 40 person-hours per month. A biweekly 90 minute meeting with 12 people costs 36 person-hours per month. Add the daily 15 minute standup with 8 people and you are at 40 more person-hours per month. The numbers add up faster than you think.
Step 2: The evaluation.
For each meeting, answer four questions.
What is this meeting supposed to produce? If you cannot answer this in one sentence, the meeting may not have a clear purpose.
Is it producing that? Not "is it useful" but "is it producing its specific purpose." Useful and purposeful are different things. A meeting can feel useful without producing what it was designed to produce.
Is this meeting the right vehicle for the purpose? Could the purpose be served by an async message, a lighter-weight check-in, or by including this purpose in an existing meeting?
Is the current frequency, duration, and attendee list right? Even if the meeting should continue, it might not need to happen weekly. Or it might not need all 12 people. Or it might need 45 minutes instead of 90.
Step 3: The decision.
For each meeting, make one of four decisions.
Keep as-is. The meeting is serving its purpose at the right frequency and size. The book notes this should be the smallest category after a real audit.
Redesign. The meeting should continue but with a different structure, cadence, attendee list, or purpose definition.
Reduce. The meeting should continue but less frequently, with fewer people, or for less time.
Eliminate. The meeting is no longer serving a purpose that justifies its cost. Cancel it.
The courage to cancel
Canceling a meeting is a leadership decision. It requires someone to say: this is no longer worth the collective time we are spending on it.
That statement is uncomfortable because it implies the past months of that meeting were a waste. They may well have been. That is okay. Meetings that were useful when they started become useless all the time. That is not a failure, it is an organizational system working correctly when the context changes. The failure is not adjusting when the context changes.
When you cancel a meeting, be direct about the reason. Address the question of where the purpose goes. Give people notice. The message does not need to be long. Two paragraphs. Direct. Clear. Done.
What to look for in an audit
Some patterns consistently signal a meeting should be redesigned or eliminated.
Attendance is declining. When people stop showing up to a recurring meeting, they have made their own evaluation. They have decided their time is better spent elsewhere. That is a signal.
The agenda is thin or repetitive. If you have had three meetings in a row where the agenda was under 20 minutes of real content, the meeting is running on habit rather than purpose.
Decisions made in the meeting do not get implemented. If you review action items and find consistent non-completion, either the meeting is not producing the right decisions or the people in the meeting do not have ownership over the work.
The meeting lacks a clear decision or output. If you end every meeting asking yourself "what did we actually accomplish," that is not a facilitation problem. That is a purpose problem.
Designing meeting sunset criteria
The most effective way to prevent meeting bloat is to design meeting sunset criteria at the time of creation.
When you start a new recurring meeting, specify four things.
Purpose: What is this meeting supposed to produce?
Duration: How long will we run this meeting before evaluating whether it should continue?
Sunset condition: What event, decision, or condition would make this meeting no longer necessary?
Owner: Who is responsible for calling the audit when the sunset condition approaches?
A meeting started to coordinate a product launch should have a sunset condition like: this meeting continues through launch. We will evaluate within two weeks post-launch whether a revised version is needed or whether the coordination need has been met.
A meeting started for a recurring operational need should have: we will audit this meeting quarterly. If attendance drops below 60% or the agenda is consistently under 20 minutes, we evaluate whether to redesign.
These criteria do not take long to write. They prevent the situation where a meeting runs for eighteen months after its reason for existence has ended.
The pattern
A recurring meeting that no one has questioned in twelve months is overdue for elimination. Run a full audit quarterly. Calculate the person-hour cost. Ask whether the meeting is still doing what it was designed to do. Then make one of four decisions: keep, redesign, reduce, or eliminate. Defaulting to "keep" is not a decision, it is inertia in writing.
The Meeting Standard walks through this and the rest of meeting design in detail, with worked examples from real recurring meeting audits. The book is on Kindle. If you want the system, here it is: The Meeting Standard on Amazon.