The language of meeting cost, defined.

The value of the work that didn't happen because this meeting did.

Economists define opportunity cost as the value of the best alternative foregone. For meetings, that's the shipped code, signed customer, written memo, or made decision that the attendees would otherwise have been producing. It's usually the larger of the two costs of any meeting, and almost always the uncounted one.

The true per-hour cost of an employee including benefits, tax, and overhead.

Base salary divided by annual working hours understates real cost by about 30%. Fully-loaded rate multiplies that by ~1.3 to capture benefits, payroll tax, equipment, software, and allocated overhead. Most finance teams already track this; ask them before you guess.

A planning heuristic for how much more than salary-hours a meeting actually costs.

A rough factor applied on top of the time cost to capture opportunity cost. 1.0× = salary-hours only (a hard floor). 1.5× = standard knowledge work. 2.0× = builders / deep-work roles. 2.5–3.0× = senior leaders whose downstream leverage compounds. The number is a heuristic, not a measured universal — it's informed by context-switching research (Mark et al., CHI 2005) and by the practical observation that senior time has larger downstream leverage.

The time and cognitive tax of returning to deep work after an interruption.

Gloria Mark's group at UC Irvine observed an average recovery time of 23 minutes and 15 seconds between the end of an interruption and the resumption of the original task. A day with four to five interruptions loses roughly two hours to context recovery alone — separate from the meetings themselves.

The single explicit statement of what a meeting decided, captured in writing.

A meeting without a decision of record has no way to tell, six weeks later, whether it produced anything. The discipline is to end every meeting with one sentence — 'we decided X, owned by Y, review date Z' — and paste it into a shared doc before people leave the room.

A working pattern where synchronous time is the exception, not the rule.

Instead of 'when should we meet?', the first question becomes 'what's the written version of this?' Meetings exist for decisions that genuinely benefit from real-time back-and-forth; everything else happens in documents, channels, or threads. GitLab and Doist publish the most-detailed public playbooks.

A written document circulated before the meeting, silently reviewed at the start.

Amazon's 'six-pager' is the most famous version: every important meeting opens with 15–20 minutes of silent reading of a narrative memo, then discussion. Pre-reads force the author to think before talking, surface disagreement earlier, and let attendees who can't be live still engage.

A weekday with zero scheduled synchronous meetings.

A recurring day each week where nobody in the organisation can schedule a meeting. The gain is rarely in the freed hours themselves — it's in the concentration on the surrounding four days. Shopify, Atlassian, Asana, and others run variations on this.

A short recurring sync where each person answers a fixed prompt.

Originated in Scrum. The pattern is 15 minutes, standing, same three questions per person. In practice most standups mutate into 30-minute seated status meetings, which is when they become expensive. If your standup runs long, it's usually a doc in a costume.

A recurring meeting whose main function is sharing what people did.

The most common kind of meeting, and almost always the wrong kind. Status is a read operation — it wants a document, not a conversation. Keep one if cohesion is the real goal, and call it what it is.

A meeting where the output is a produced artefact, not a discussion.

Two to four people in a shared doc or piece of code, producing output as they go. Working sessions are generally cheap meetings — the cost is attached to something shipping.

A reversible decision that doesn't need heavy process.

Jeff Bezos's framing: most decisions are two-way doors — you can walk back through them. Treating them like one-way doors (irreversible) is the single most common cause of over-meeting. Reserve the heavy review process for actual one-way doors.

The observation that makers and managers structure time differently.

Paul Graham's essay: managers slice the day into one-hour blocks and can meet at will; makers work in half-day blocks and a single 11am meeting destroys the whole morning. Respecting the difference is a large part of scheduling discipline.

The practice of deleting all recurring meetings and letting the essential ones regrow.

Named after Netflix's chaos-engineering tool for infrastructure. The calendar version: delete every recurring meeting in one shot, announce that teams may reinstate anything that genuinely matters, and let attrition do most of the pruning. Shopify ran the largest documented version in January 2023.