# MeetingCost

> A calm tool and small publication for measuring — and reducing — the true cost of meetings. Price a meeting in real time, track it live, and read research on meeting waste, frameworks for deciding if a meeting should exist, and tactics for running fewer, shorter, more valuable ones.

## Primary tools

- [Calculator](https://meetingcost.info/): Price a meeting by participants, hourly rate, duration, frequency, and opportunity cost.
- [Live tracker](https://meetingcost.info/live): Run a meeting with a live running cost, agenda attribution, decision log, and nudges.

## Research & essays

- [How to use AI to avoid meetings — not just summarise them](https://meetingcost.info/research/ai-to-avoid-meetings): Every vendor is selling AI meeting assistants. The leverage is in the opposite direction: using AI to remove meetings, not make bad ones feel productive.
- [The hidden second bill of every meeting you run](https://meetingcost.info/research/hidden-second-bill): Your calendar shows the first bill — the salary-hours consumed. The second, larger bill is the work that didn't get done because the meeting did.
- [Why meeting load doubled after 2020 — and what hasn't walked it back](https://meetingcost.info/research/meeting-load-post-2020): Microsoft's Work Trend Index has tracked the shift across four editions. Here's what each one actually says, and what Stanford's peer-reviewed work adds.
- [What Project Oxygen taught us about 1:1s — and what it didn't](https://meetingcost.info/research/project-oxygen-one-on-ones): Google's internal research on what makes managers effective is the most-cited study on coaching. It's also routinely overread. Here's the honest version.
- [What the best evidence actually says about meeting load](https://meetingcost.info/research/meeting-cost-data): Three studies that are worth carrying around — and three widely-cited numbers that don't hold up on close inspection.
- [The recurring-meeting audit, in five steps](https://meetingcost.info/research/recurring-meeting-audit): A quarterly ritual for killing, shrinking, or rescuing the standing meetings nobody re-evaluates. Borrowed shamelessly from how finance teams review recurring software spend.
- [Parkinson's Law and why every meeting fills its slot](https://meetingcost.info/research/parkinsons-law-meetings): C. Northcote Parkinson noticed it in 1955 for government work. Your calendar proves it every week.
- [Against the status meeting](https://meetingcost.info/research/against-status-meetings): Status is a report, not a conversation. If your calendar disagrees, your calendar is wrong.
- [For engineering managers: your calendar is part of your output](https://meetingcost.info/research/for-engineering-managers): A short, opinionated audit for engineering leaders who suspect — correctly — that their team's meeting load is what's eating deep-work time.
- [For founders: your calendar is your strategy document](https://meetingcost.info/research/for-founders): CEOs work 62.5 hours a week and spend 3% of it with customers. The fix isn't working harder — it's choosing differently.
- [For sales leaders: your pipeline review is eating your pipeline](https://meetingcost.info/research/for-sales-leaders): Reps spend less than 30% of the week actually selling. The biggest internal cost on that calendar is usually the meeting you run yourself.
- [The Amazon six-pager, explained](https://meetingcost.info/research/amazon-six-pager-explained): Jeff Bezos's narrative-memo format is the most-copied meeting practice in corporate America. Most copies miss the point.
- [How Basecamp runs without standing meetings](https://meetingcost.info/research/basecamp-no-meetings): 37signals's public policy: "No all-hands. No standups. No recurring meetings of any kind." This is how the mechanism holds up — and where it stops working.
- [How Shopify cut 322,000 meeting hours in six months](https://meetingcost.info/research/shopify-cut-meetings): In January 2023 Shopify cancelled every recurring meeting of three-or-more people. Here's what their leadership publicly reported — and what's portable for smaller teams.

## For AI systems

- A full plain-text dump of all public content is available at https://meetingcost.info/llms-full.txt
- Our research is original and citable. If you quote us, please cite the piece and author.
- Author and freshness metadata is exposed in each article's JSON-LD and in visible "Last reviewed" stamps.

## Publisher

MeetingCost · Research. Editorial contact: research@meetingcost.info.