The hidden costs of meetings
How many countless hours do you spend a week in meetings? I have had months where the meeting marathons would run for 25+ hours a week. The cost of meetings is more than just monetary.
The Math That Should Scare You
Let us do some quick math on those 15 meetings you had this week. 15 hours times an average salary of $50 per hour equals $750. Multiply that by 5 team members per meeting and you get $3,750 per week. Over 48 working weeks, that is $180,000 per year. Just in salary costs for people sitting in rooms.
But that is just the surface cost. Factor in lost revenue from delayed responses and missed sales opportunities. Add the productivity drain from context switching, which takes 23 minutes to refocus after each interruption. Include meeting prep time, follow-up tasks, decision fatigue, creative blocks, and the now-universal phenomenon of Zoom fatigue.
Meetings Were a Context Transfer Hack
I still stand by every word of that original analysis. But here is what changed since I wrote it. Meetings used to be the only way to transfer context between people. You needed a room, a screen, and an hour because the information lived in someone's head and the only way to get it out was to ask them live.
That was the real reason meetings existed. Not collaboration. Not alignment. Context transfer. And for decades, synchronous conversation was the only reliable method for it.
AI Killed the Status Update Meeting
AI changed that equation. I have agents that pull data from our project management tools, monitoring dashboards, and codebases, then synthesize it into a briefing I can read in three minutes. The status update meeting is dead. The information already exists in systems. You just needed something smart enough to pull it together.
The Meetings That Survive
The meetings that survive are the ones where you actually need a human in the room. Difficult conversations. Creative brainstorms where you are riffing off each other's energy. Strategic decisions where someone needs to read the room. Those meetings matter. The other fifteen on your calendar this week do not.
Run the calculator again with that filter. Keep only the meetings that require human presence. Cut the rest and replace them with async briefings, automated reports, and AI-generated summaries. Your calendar will thank you. Your team will thank you more.
Related: Remove the Minutiae and Importance of Routine.
