In 2023, Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings in a single week. Not cancelled them individually, not gradually wound them down. Deleted them, company-wide, and told employees to add them back only if they could justify the cost. The Verge covered it at the time. The result, according to Shopify’s own figures, was that employees recovered roughly 18% of their work time.
That number should bother you if you’re running meetings at a company that hasn’t done anything like that.
The actual cost most people ignore
An 8-person, 1-hour meeting isn’t a 1-hour meeting. It’s 8 hours of collective work time. At a loaded cost of around $75 per person per hour, a routine weekly sync with 8 people costs about $600 a week, or roughly $31,200 over a year. And that’s before you count the context-switching cost of breaking people out of deep work.
Most meeting schedules aren’t designed with any of that in mind. They accumulate. Someone adds a weekly sync in Q1. Another team adds a cross-functional standup in Q3. By year-end you have 17 hours of standing meetings that nobody has audited since they were created.
I’m skeptical that most teams could recover 18% of their time the way Shopify did, because Shopify had both the organizational will and the top-down permission structure to do it. Most teams don’t. But I do think the average knowledge worker is sitting in four to six meetings per week that could either be cut entirely or cut in half.
Three questions before you schedule anything
Before sending a calendar invite, it’s worth running three checks:
- Does this meeting have a specific decision or outcome it needs to reach, beyond “sync up”?
- Does it need to be synchronous, or would a Loom video or Slack thread get the same result?
- Is every person on the invite list actually needed, or are some people there because it feels polite to include them?
If you can’t answer the first one clearly, the meeting probably shouldn’t happen. “Sync up” is a category of feeling, not a meeting purpose.
A lot of meetings that feel necessary are actually status updates. Status updates are almost always better as written documents because they create a searchable record, they don’t require everyone to be available at the same time, and they don’t punish people in different time zones.
What happens in the room
Start on time. This one seems petty but it isn’t. Starting five minutes late trains everyone on the team that being five minutes late is acceptable. Within a month, “five minutes” becomes eight, then twelve. Starting on time is the only mechanism that keeps the schedule from drifting, and the people who are always punctual shouldn’t have their time wasted by those who aren’t.
Send the agenda 24 hours in advance, not five minutes before. Not because formality matters but because people make better contributions when they’ve had time to think. Meetings where people are reading the agenda for the first time when they join are discussions, not decisions.
Use a parking lot for tangential topics. When a conversation starts going sideways, someone writes the topic on a shared doc or whiteboard under “parking lot,” it gets noted, and the meeting stays on track. This isn’t about shutting ideas down; it’s about finishing the meeting with its stated purpose accomplished rather than spending 40 minutes on something that wasn’t on the agenda.
End with action items. Not “we should probably look into that” but “Maya will pull the Q2 data by Thursday and share it in the channel before the Friday review.” Owner, deliverable, deadline. Three things. Without those three things the meeting produced conversation, not work.
The 25/50-minute rule
Schedule 25-minute and 50-minute meetings instead of 30 and 60. The buffer time between meetings isn’t just nice-to-have. It’s the time where you process what just happened, handle the one quick follow-up that came out of the discussion, and get back to deep work before the next meeting starts. Without it, you’re context-switching at full speed all day and wondering why you feel exhausted by 3pm.
This is a small structural change and it works. Most calendar tools support it natively now.
Recurring meetings deserve a harder look
The most wasteful meeting category is the recurring meeting whose original purpose has ended. The project it was created for shipped. The team that needed weekly alignment now needs monthly alignment. But the meeting persists because nobody got around to cancelling it.
A reasonable practice: every recurring meeting gets a 90-day review. Whoever owns it asks whether the cadence is still right, whether the attendee list still makes sense, and whether the meeting needs to exist at all. This takes about ten minutes and saves hours.
According to LinkedIn Economic Graph research, meeting overload is one of the top three reasons knowledge workers cite for burnout. The fix isn’t resilience training or better time management. It’s fewer, better meetings.
What’s your current recurring meeting count? I’d bet at least two of them could end today.