The Meeting Overload Problem And How I Cut Ours by Half

When I audited a program I'd inherited, I found 14 recurring meetings a week across the core team. Nobody had designed that number on purpose, it had accumulated, one 'let's just get a standing sync on the calendar' at a time, over about a year. We cut it to seven without losing a single decision that actually mattered.

The audit itself was simple: for two weeks, I asked every meeting owner one question afterward, what decision or update happened in that meeting that couldn't have happened another way? For roughly half the meetings, the honest answer was 'nothing, really, it's just where we check in.'

Those meetings weren't useless because checking in is useless. They were useless because the format was wrong for the purpose. A status check-in doesn't need a live meeting; it needs a shared async update people can read on their own time. We replaced four separate status syncs with a single written weekly update, and reclaimed four hours a week per person almost immediately.

The meetings that survived the cut had one thing in common: they existed to make a decision or resolve a disagreement that genuinely needed real-time back-and-forth. Those are worth protecting fiercely. Everything else is a candidate for async.

The test I now apply to any new recurring meeting request: could this be a shared document instead? If the honest answer is yes, it's a document, not a meeting, no matter how reasonable the request to 'just get a quick sync going' sounds in the moment.