How to Audit Your Recurring Meetings (and Cancel the Right Ones)

Everyone can name the meeting they resent. Far fewer can name the most expensive one, and they are rarely the same meeting — the one that grates is usually short and badly run, while the one that costs the most is quietly large and has been in the calendar so long nobody questions it.

An audit fixes that by replacing an opinion with a number. It takes about an hour.

Step 1: list what actually recurs

Export or scroll a typical month and write down every recurring meeting, with three facts each: how many people attend (the number who actually show, not the number invited), how long it runs, and how often. Nothing else yet.

Two things usually surface immediately. There is at least one meeting nobody can explain the origin of, and at least one where the attendee list has quietly doubled.

Step 2: price each one

Put each meeting through a cost calculation: salary time for everyone in the room, multiplied by a loaded-cost factor to account for the fact that salary is not what an hour costs, for the length of the meeting, times how often it runs in a year. Our meeting cost calculator does it with role presets in four currencies, and shows its assumptions so you can adjust them to your payroll rather than argue with ours.

Write the annual figure next to each meeting. That is the audit.

Step 3: rank by cost, not by irritation

Sort the list by the annual number. This is the step that changes minds, because the order is almost never the order people expect. A 30-minute daily standup with eight people costs far more per year than a painful two-hour monthly review, and it is the one nobody thinks to question.

Step 4: ask four questions of the expensive ones

Start at the top of the list and work down. For each:

• What decision comes out of this? If the answer is “we share updates”, that is a document.
• Who actually speaks? Count the people whose voice changes the outcome. Everyone else is an audience and can read the notes.
• Does it need to be synchronous, or just fast? A deadline is not a reason to gather calendars.
• Would you spend the annual figure on it? Blunt, and effective, because it turns a scheduling habit back into a purchase decision.

Step 5: cancel carefully

Cancelling a recurring meeting outright is how you end up reinstating it a month later, with the added cost of having looked wrong. Two approaches work better.

Pause rather than cancel. “We’re skipping this for four weeks — if we miss it, we’ll put it back.” Almost nothing comes back, and the ones that do come back genuinely earned it. It also removes the argument, because nobody has to concede anything.

Shrink before you cut. Halve the attendee list, or halve the duration. A 60-minute meeting with eight people becomes 30 minutes with four, which is a 75% cut in cost and usually no loss at all in output. This is often the right answer for meetings that are genuinely useful to three people and merely tolerated by five.

Step 6: replace, do not just delete

Whatever the meeting was doing still needs doing. A written update on the same cadence with a deadline for objections covers most status meetings and leaves a record. A short recording covers most walkthroughs. A decision document with comments covers most reviews.

The failure mode to avoid is running both — where the document becomes a summary of the meeting rather than a replacement for it, and you have added work instead of removing it.

What to keep

An audit that cancels everything is as lazy as one that cancels nothing. Meetings genuinely beat documents when the disagreement is unresolved and nobody knows where the objections are, when the subject is sensitive, when the problem is new enough that nobody can write the document yet, or when the point is building trust rather than transferring information. Those are worth their cost, and the audit’s real value is that it tells you which ones they are.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate what a recurring meeting costs per year?

Take each attendee’s annual salary, multiply by a loaded-cost factor of roughly 1.3 for payroll taxes, benefits and equipment, divide by the hours in a working year, and multiply by the length of the meeting. Sum across the room, then multiply by the occurrences per year: 52 for weekly, 26 for fortnightly, 12 for monthly, and 260 for every working day. The meeting cost calculator does the arithmetic and shows the assumptions.

How often should I audit meetings?

Twice a year is enough for most teams, plus whenever the team changes shape. Recurring meetings accumulate quietly — the attendee list grows one well-meaning invite at a time — so the value comes from repeating it rather than from doing it perfectly once.

What is a reasonable number of attendees?

There is no universal number, but the useful signal is how many people speak rather than how many are invited. Past about five attendees most rooms have a silent majority, and past eight a discussion tends to become a presentation. If more than half the room has not spoken by the halfway mark, you are running a broadcast, and a broadcast can be a document.

How do I cancel a meeting without upsetting people?

Pause it rather than cancel it, and say why in numbers. “This costs about £30,000 a year and we have not made a decision in it since March — let’s skip four weeks and see if we miss it” is a much easier conversation than an opinion about whether it is useful. It also gives the meeting a fair chance to prove it matters.