How to Audit Your Team Calendar for Meeting Waste
Patrick Bushe
March 3, 2025 · 5 min read
Meetings creep. A weekly check-in starts with three people and grows to ten; a project ends but its standup carries on. A calendar audit every few months clears out what no longer earns its place.
1. List the recurring meetings
Recurring meetings are where most waste hides, because nobody decides to keep them; they just continue. For each, note:
- Name and purpose.
- Length and frequency.
- Number of attendees.
- Owner.
Google Calendar's Time insights, available on work accounts, shows how much of your week goes to meetings. Microsoft 365 users can check Viva Insights.
2. Measure time and cost
Multiply length × attendees × frequency to get hours per month. Then estimate cost: at a $100,000 average salary, each person costs about $48 an hour. A weekly one-hour meeting with eight people costs about $385 each time, or around $20,000 a year. The meeting cost calculator does the math.
3. Ask four questions about each meeting
- Does it have a clear purpose that the owner can state in one sentence?
- Does it lead to decisions or actions, or just share information?
- Does everyone invited need to be there?
- Would anyone miss it if it were cancelled for a month?
4. Decide: cut, shrink, change or keep
- Cut meetings with no clear purpose.
- Shrink the length (60 to 30 minutes) or the guest list.
- Change information-only meetings to written updates. See async standups.
- Reduce frequency from weekly to every two weeks.
- Keep meetings that clearly lead to decisions.
Look beyond recurring meetings
One-off meetings add up too. Check how many were booked with less than a day's notice, how many ran over, and how many had no agenda in the invite. Those patterns point to habits worth changing, such as requiring an agenda for any meeting longer than 15 minutes.
5. Try a pause
If people disagree, pause a meeting for a month and see what happens. Bring it back if work suffers. Often nobody asks.
6. Protect focus time
Block regular no-meeting time across the team, such as mornings or one full day a week.
7. Repeat every quarter
Meetings creep back. Meeting Cost Calculator shows a live total during a meeting, which keeps the cost visible between audits. See tracking meeting costs quarterly and how Shopify and Basecamp cut meetings.
