A small publication about the cost of meetings.
Data, frameworks, and opinion from our editors and a handful of very patient practitioners. Short when it can be, long when it has to be, always cited.
The hidden second bill of every meeting you run.
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.
How to use AI to avoid meetings — not just summarise them.
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.
Why meeting load doubled after 2020 — and what hasn't walked it back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
C. Northcote Parkinson noticed it in 1955 for government work. Your calendar proves it every week.
Against the status meeting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seen a meeting culture change for real? We want to publish it.
We publish short practitioner case studies — 1,500 words, written by the person who did the work. Honest about what didn’t work too.