Most recurring meetings should die. Not because meetings are inherently bad, but because they quietly outlive their usefulness. Nearly every recurring meeting began with a legitimate purpose: alignment, coordination, decision-making. Over time, that purpose erodes. The meeting remains.
Meetings are one of the few commitments at work that multiply without resistance. Projects end. Teams evolve. Tools improve. Yet the calendar stays frozen in time. A single one-hour weekly meeting with six people costs over 300 hours a year. Multiply that across several meetings and you begin to see the scale of the problem.
The true cost of meetings is not just time. It is attention. Meetings fragment the day into unusable blocks, preventing deep work. They force context switching, which drains cognitive energy long after the meeting ends. Even "light" meetings create heavy residue.
This is why the quarterly meeting audit matters. Once every quarter, you deliberately review every recurring meeting on your calendar. Not ad hoc. Not reactively. Systematically.
Start by listing every recurring meeting you attend or run. Weekly syncs. Monthly reviews. Standing check-ins. Status calls. Put them all in one list. Seeing them together is often uncomfortable—and necessary.
For each meeting, ask three questions.
First: does this meeting still serve a clear purpose? Can you articulate, in one sentence, what problem it solves today—not six months ago? If the answer is vague or historical, that meeting is already on life support.
Second: is this the best format? Many meetings exist because information once needed to be shared synchronously. Today, that same information could be shared asynchronously in a document, dashboard, or short update. If the meeting is mostly one-way status reporting, it does not need to exist.
Third: is the frequency justified? Weekly meetings are often a default, not a necessity. Many can be biweekly or monthly without loss. Others can become on-demand—scheduled only when a decision is required.
Be ruthless but thoughtful. The goal is not to eliminate meetings for sport. The goal is to protect focus and ensure that the meetings that remain actually matter.
If you own a meeting, you have leverage. Cancel it outright if it no longer serves a purpose. If it still matters, shorten it. A 60-minute meeting can often be done in 30. A 30-minute meeting in 15. Parkinson’s Law applies brutally to meetings: work expands to fill the time allotted.
If you do not own the meeting, you still have options. Propose a trial change: reduce frequency for one quarter, or replace one meeting per month with an async update. Most teams are more open to experimentation than you expect, especially when framed as an efficiency gain.
Importantly, when you remove a meeting, replace it with clarity. Document decisions. Write brief summaries. Define ownership. Meetings often persist because they feel safer than ambiguity. Remove the meeting but increase explicit communication.
A quarterly cadence is intentional. It is frequent enough to prevent calendar decay, but not so frequent that it becomes another chore. Put it on your calendar. Treat it as non-negotiable.
The result is not just fewer meetings. It is longer stretches of uninterrupted time. Clearer priorities. Less cognitive fatigue. A calendar that reflects reality instead of history.
Most recurring meetings should die. The ones that survive should earn their place.