Score recurring meetings before your next weekly review

Score the meeting before you defend it

Your weekly standup starts on time, ends late, and nobody can say what changed. Among the workday activities examined, meeting volume was the best indicator of a pay increase.

More than 9,000 Norwegian workers were surveyed and linked to matched employer-employee administrative data for the NBER meeting study. Meetings consumed an average of 12 percent of work hours and 14 percent of firm wage bills. Among the 60 percent of workers who regularly have meetings, the average was more than one hour per workday in meetings.

Meeting frequency and intensity were positively related to worker wage growth. Workers in meeting-intensive firms reported greater on-the-job learning. The raise link does not make every meeting valuable. A December Resume Now survey of about 1,000 US workers found that about 64 percent said no more than half of their meetings were actually productive.

Price the recurring slot

Inventory every recurring meeting on the team calendar. Write the name, owner, cadence, standing attendees, and the last decision it produced. A blank purpose is a candidate for the cut list, and a stale purpose is a candidate for a shorter slot.

Multiply attendees by duration and by each person's loaded hourly rate. Add the owner's prep time and the follow-up work that exists only because the meeting happened. The cost figure should be one you can defend in a weekly review, not a vague feeling that the slot is expensive. That line is what makes keep, cut, or shorten defensible.

Use the wage-bill share as a sanity check. When a recurring slot takes a large share of team time, the cost is not trivial. Pull the rate from payroll, not from a headline salary, and keep the number next to the meeting name so the review can see it.

Score the coordination asset

Rate shared context, learning, and decision quality as weak, adequate, or strong. Ask whether the meeting creates a decision, surfaces a risk, or teaches the team something it could not get from a document. Note the asset and the evidence under each meeting.

Weight the assets by how hard they are to replace. A shared context that only exists in the meeting is more valuable than a status update that could be a message. A learning moment that changes how the team works is more valuable than a repeat of the same plan.

Do not score attendance as value. A full attendance list can look like coordination while producing only status updates. A meeting that cannot name a decision, a risk, or a learning asset has unearned cost.

Make the keep, cut, or shorten call

• Inventory: name, owner, cadence, standing attendees, and the last decision produced.
• Price: attendees, duration, loaded hourly rate, prep time, and follow-up work.
• Score: shared context, learning, and decision quality, with evidence for each asset.
• Call: keep, cut, or shorten, with a named owner and a date for the calendar change.

Check cadence against the decision cycle. A weekly standup can survive when the team is shipping and needs a shared status. A recurring review earns its place when documents are thin and the founders still need to align. Change the cadence before defending a meeting that is out of step with the work. A shorter slot is often the first fix.

Make the call before the next weekly review. Keep the meeting when coordination assets clearly exceed cost and cadence still fits the work. Cut it for weak assets, an unclear owner, or information that can be sent in a document. Shorten it for real assets in a slot longer than the work requires.

Put the scorecard in the weekly review, not in a separate meeting. Change the calendar to match the score, then let the next cycle show whether the meeting is covering its cost.