I open the calendar of an operations director at an SME of 60 people. What I see is a tetris of coloured blocks. Morning meetings of 45 minutes every day. Planning meetings twice a week. Daily check-ins. Alignment meetings. One-to-one updates.
I ask: “Of all these, which ones could the company not live without?”.
Silence. They can’t answer.
That’s the problem. Meetings start for a real reason. Then they become recurring. And they stay recurring out of inertia, not because they are still needed.
How a morning meeting eats 250 hours a year.
The morning meeting is born to avoid long meetings. Ten minutes. What are you working on, what blocks do you have. Done. But then it becomes 45 minutes. The manager starts asking questions. The team goes into the details. It turns into a mini planning session.
A meeting that was meant to last 10 minutes has eaten an hour a day for 250 days: 250 hours a year. Multiply by the number of people attending, and you have lost thousands of hours.
How do you tell the meetings that are needed from those that aren’t?
Make a list of all the recurring meetings. For each one, answer this question: “If this meeting didn’t exist for four weeks, who would notice and why?”.
If the answer is “Nobody”, the meeting isn’t needed. Remove it.
If the answer is “We would do it anyway, because it keeps us connected”, then you’re talking about bureaucratic coordination. It’s a meeting that exists to reassure the manager, not to solve real problems.
What I do when I walk into a company.
The first thing is to block two meetings on the spot. The morning meeting? I cut it to 15 minutes. In 15 minutes people learn to be concise. The change in time available for real work is immediate.
The two-hour planning meeting with all the stakeholders involved? Once the priority list is done, the actual planning takes 20 minutes. The rest is discussion that creates confusion, not clarity. In two weeks you find that nothing has changed, because the important work was already clear after the first 20 minutes.
What is the risk when you remove a meeting?
People tell you: “But then how do we stay in sync?”. The answer is simple: keep working. If the meeting wasn’t needed, staying in sync without it creates no problems. If the meeting was needed, the problem becomes obvious right away. And then you bring it back, but less often and with more purpose.
The real question to ask of every recurring meeting is: “Which decision did I take in this meeting that I couldn’t take otherwise?”. If there is no clear answer, the meeting exists out of inertia, not for value.
This is where the margin starts to breathe again. Because the team finds the time to do the work that counts, instead of spending it in meetings that solve nothing.
Which recurring meeting in your calendar would nobody notice if it disappeared tomorrow?