How often should this run?

Quarterly. Monthly is too noisy; annual lets too much accrete. If you run leadership offsites, tie the audit to the cadence around them.

Usually a small ops team (2–4 people) with a direct line to an exec who'll sponsor cuts politically. The audit itself is the easy part; the political cover is the load-bearing part.

Include them, but expect most to survive. The audit is more useful for cross-team forums, status meetings, and standing reviews.

Sometimes. The trick that works for me: run the cuts as reversible. Say out loud — and in writing — 'we will be wrong about some of these; put them back if it matters.' Reversibility is what makes the first-pass cuts cheaper than the debate.

← Research/Framework/8 min read

The recurring-meeting audit, in five steps.

Published: March 12, 2026·Last reviewed: April 19, 2026Current

A quarterly ritual for killing, shrinking, or rescuing the standing meetings nobody re-evaluates. Borrowed shamelessly from how finance teams review recurring software spend.

Quick answer

How do I audit my team's recurring meetings?

Pull every recurring calendar event. Score each by total cost (use the calculator). Ask the owner: what decision does this produce? Kill the ones that can't answer. Shrink the ones that can. Keep the load-bearing few and fix their shape. Publish what you saved.

Adam Stead

Mar 12 · MeetingCost Research

A recurring meeting is a subscription. You signed up once, probably for a good reason, and you haven’t re-evaluated since. Here’s a five-step audit we recommend running once a quarter, by teams, with a sharp timer.

Export the recurring calendar

Pull every event that repeats. Include 1:1s, standups, cross-functional syncs. Don't pre-judge relevance — the boring ones are often the most expensive.

Score each by total cost

Use the MeetingCost calculator. Include opportunity cost at a realistic multiplier for the attendees. Sort descending — the top decile is where the conversation lives.

Ask the owner for the decision

Every recurring meeting should be able to answer: what decision does this produce? If the owner can't name one, it's probably a status meeting in disguise.

Triage — kill, shrink, or rescue

Kill if no decision emerges. Shrink if one does but fewer people or less time could produce it. Rescue if it's load-bearing — then fix its shape (agenda, attendees, cadence).

Publish the savings

Write up what you removed and what you recovered — in dollars, hours, and headcount-equivalent. Without the writeup, the calendar refills within a quarter.

Note

Teams that run this audit report killing 20–40% of their recurring meetings in the first pass, and shrinking another 30% within two quarters. The gain is almost entirely in focus, not hours.

Frequently asked

FAQPage schema

Quarterly. Monthly is too noisy; annual lets too much accrete. If you run leadership offsites, tie the audit to the cadence around them.

About the author

Adam Stead

Founder & editor, MeetingCost

CTO, founder and operations coach. Has built and run multiple companies across tech and marketing. Writes MeetingCost from the vantage point of someone who has sat through — and called — too many of the meetings he now advises people to cut.

CTO & founderOperations coachTech + marketing operator

LinkedIn ↗

Sources

01Stop the Meeting Madness · Perlow, Hadley & Eun · HBR2017
02Shopify's 'Chaos Monkey' for meetings · Fortune (reporting on internal memo)2023
03GitLab Handbook — Meetings · GitLab2024

Keep reading

All research →