What Is Meeting Bloat and How to Diagnose It in Your Organization

Meeting bloat is when meetings grow faster than the work needs: more recurring slots, longer calls and more people in each. No one decides to create it. It builds up one reasonable invitation at a time, until people spend their days in meetings and do their real work in the evenings.

Signs of meeting bloat

• People say they can't get work done during work hours.
• Calendars have few blocks of two or more free hours.
• Recurring meetings no one remembers the purpose of.
• Meetings where most attendees never speak.
• Status updates read aloud that could have been written.
• Meetings to prepare for other meetings.
• Decisions get revisited because the right people weren't there, or too many were.

Diagnose it with a calendar audit

1. Pick a typical two-week period and a sample of people in different roles.
2. Count meeting hours per person, number of recurring meetings, average attendees and average length.
3. Measure focus time: how many blocks of two hours or more each person has without meetings.
4. Label each meeting: decision, problem-solving, status update, information sharing, or relationship (such as one-on-ones).
5. Ask attendees: for each recurring meeting, would they miss it if it stopped?

See auditing a team calendar for a step-by-step version.

Put a cost on it

Multiply each meeting's attendees by their average hourly pay and length. Recurring meetings add up quickly once you count a full year. Meeting Cost Calculator shows a running cost during a meeting from the number of attendees and their average salary. See presenting meeting costs to leadership.

Common causes

• Inviting people "just in case", so no one feels left out.
• Default 60-minute slots when 25 would do.
• Recurring meetings set up for a project that has since ended.
• No written way to share updates, so meetings fill the gap.

Fixes that stick

• Reset recurring meetings: cancel them all and bring back only the ones people ask for. Shopify did a version of this in 2023. See what Shopify and Basecamp did.
• Require an agenda and a clear purpose for every meeting.
• Shorter defaults: 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60.
• Move updates to writing. See async vs meetings.
• Protect focus time, for example with no-meeting days.

Repeat the audit after three months. Bloat comes back unless someone keeps checking.