The Meeting Audit: Reclaiming Ten Hours a Week From Your Own Calendar

Owners describe their calendars the way people describe weather: something that happens to them. But every recurring meeting was created by someone, usually to solve a problem nobody remembers, and most have outlived their purpose while keeping their slot. The meeting audit is the correction — a fortnight of evidence, four questions per meeting, then a redesign — and done properly it returns owners the better part of ten hours a week.

Gather two weeks of evidence

Don't redesign from memory; memory defends the status quo. For two weeks, after every meeting, write one line recording what it was, how long it ran, what decisions or commitments came out of it, and what your specific contribution was. No judgement during the fortnight, just the ledger. When you review it, the data usually does the arguing for you: standing meetings that have produced no decisions in living memory, hour-long slots whose useful content would fit in a short message, entries where your recorded contribution amounts to "was present", and updates read aloud to people who can read.

Put a price on the room

While the log is open, cost each recurring meeting the way a procurement officer would. Every attendee-hour carries a loaded rate: salary, plus super, leave and the other on-costs, plus the value of whatever that person would otherwise be doing. Multiply by attendees, by duration, by frequency, by a year. You don't need precise figures for the exercise to work; even a rough loaded rate makes the annual cost of a standing meeting visible, and visibility changes the conversation. A recurring meeting is a subscription, and almost nobody knows what theirs costs. Once it's priced, "I quite like this catch-up" stops being a sufficient argument for renewal. It's the same discipline behind measuring your coordination tax: overhead you can't see is overhead you can't cut.

Ask the four questions

Take every recurring meeting through the same gauntlet.

• Does it need to exist? If a meeting exchanges information but produces no decisions, it's a document that never learned to write. Convert it: a written weekly update, read asynchronously, with a short live discussion only when someone flags an issue.
• Does it need me? Owners attend many meetings as a security blanket, theirs or the team's. If your contribution log says "approved things" or "nodded", the meeting needs your decision rights, not your presence. Delegate the rights, read the minutes, and drop in occasionally to keep quality honest.
• Does it need to be that long? Default durations are calendar-software artefacts, not considered choices. Meetings expand to fill the slot; halve the slot and the content survives remarkably often, because the padding goes first.
• Could it be async? Status updates, reporting, FYIs and most approvals move faster in writing. Reserve synchronous time for what genuinely needs it: contested decisions, creative work, difficult conversations, anything where tone matters.

Redesign, then defend

Apply the answers in one pass rather than trickling changes out. Cancel the dead meetings outright, with a sentence explaining what replaces them. Convert the information-transfer ones to written updates. Shorten the survivors and give each a named owner, a stated purpose and a standing agenda; a meeting nobody owns drifts back to old habits within months. Then protect what you reclaimed, because vacated calendar space attracts new occupants. Book the recovered hours as appointments with the work only you can do — strategy, key relationships, the thinking that day-to-day operations never leave room for — or the audit will need repeating sooner than you'd like.

Repeat it annually

Calendars silt up; that's their nature. New hires create new catch-ups, projects end but their check-ins persist, and the default response to any dropped ball is another recurring meeting. Run the audit as a yearly discipline and it stays a light exercise. Skip it for a few years and you're back to describing your diary as weather.