Picture a Tuesday operations meeting. Forty minutes in, someone brings up the late supplier delivery. Fair enough, it's a problem. But it was a problem at Monday's production meeting too, and it'll get another airing at Thursday's weekly review. Mostly the same people will be in the room each time, nodding.
Nobody set out to build that. Each of those meetings was started by a sensible person who had a real problem to solve. What went wrong is duller. Nobody has ever sat down and looked at all of the organisation's regular meetings in one place.
How you end up here
Think about where recurring meetings come from. A customer complains, so a weekly quality call appears. A deadline slips, so there's a Friday progress review. A new manager arrives and wants a Monday catch-up with the team. Every one of them made sense on the day it was set up.
The catch is that each was agreed by somebody looking at one problem. No one asked what else was already in the diary. And once a meeting exists it tends to stay, because scrapping it means somebody has to stand up and say it's pointless, and leaving it alone takes no effort at all.
You probably don't need a study to tell you where this ends up, but there is one. A 2017 Harvard Business Review article found that executives were spending nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 in the 1960s. The authors also surveyed 182 senior managers, and 71% of them described their meetings as unproductive and inefficient.
Set that against a standard UK working week of 37.5 hours and it's 61% of the week. Three days out of five, near enough.
Stretch it over a year and it looks worse. In England and Wales, 2027 has 253 working days once weekends and bank holidays are taken out. Take off a typical 25 days of annual leave and you're down to 228. Then there's sickness. The Office for National Statistics puts the UK average at 4.4 days lost per worker in 2025, which leaves about 224 days actually at work. At 23 hours a week, roughly 137 of those go on meetings. That leaves about 87 days, a little over 17 weeks, to do everything the meetings were about.
Now suppose the meetings are what they often are: updates, information being passed around, people being kept in the loop. No actual task gets done in them. That leaves 14.5 hours a week, under three hours a day, to do a full week's work. To manage it you'd have to work at about two and a half times your normal pace. Or keep your normal pace and put in a 60-hour week.
Nobody does either, of course. So the gap closes in one of three ways. People rush and the quality drops. People work late. Or the work simply doesn't get done, and it turns up later as a missed date or a problem nobody had time to head off. Most places get a bit of all three, and none of it shows in the meeting calendar.
So where does the rest of the job get done? For a lot of people, after hours. The TUC's analysis of the official Labour Force Survey found that 3.5 million UK employees, about one in eight, worked unpaid overtime in 2025. Those who did put in an average of 6.8 extra hours a week. That's most of a sixth working day, every week, for nothing. The TUC values it at around £8,100 a year each. Meetings aren't the only reason people stay late, but a week with 23 hours of them doesn't leave many others.
There's a human cost as well, though it isn't the same for everyone. A 2006 study of 980 employees in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that for people who are driven to get things done, more meetings went with lower well-being, and lots of short meetings were worse than a few long ones. Other people didn't mind them, and some liked the structure. Meanwhile the Health and Safety Executive counts 964,000 workers in Britain with work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25. Nobody can say how much of that is down to meetings, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. But if the people who most want to get on with the job are the ones meetings wear down, it's worth knowing who is sitting in how many.
Most advice on this is about running each meeting better. Have an agenda, keep it to half an hour, invite fewer people. All good, and a badly run meeting does need sorting out. It just doesn't help much if the meeting is covering the same ground as two others. You end up with a very efficient duplicate.
It isn't only meetings
The same thing happens with routine jobs of every sort. Stock counts, equipment checks, housekeeping walks, backups, supplier reviews, team briefings, the monthly report.
Two departments end up checking the same storeroom on different days and writing it up on different forms. One team puts together a weekly report, and another team builds its own version from scratch because they didn't know the first one existed. And somewhere there's a check that really does matter and isn't being done by anyone, because everybody thought it was somebody else's.
It all comes from the same place. The full list of what gets done regularly doesn't exist anywhere. Bits of it are in people's diaries, bits are in a procedures folder, and a fair amount is in the head of whoever has worked there longest.
Get it all onto one page
The answer isn't clever. Write down every regular meeting, check and review you can think of. Then set them out on one page, grouped by how often they happen: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, twice a year, yearly. Mark the day or the month each one falls on.
Allow an afternoon, and do it with one or two people who know how the place actually runs rather than how the procedures say it runs. The first version will be rough. It'll still tell you things you didn't know.
The duplicates are the first thing you'll notice. Put three meetings with much the same purpose next to each other and somebody will ask why there are three before you've finished writing. The saving is real, too. If you fold two weekly one-hour meetings of eight people into one, that's eight hours of people's time back every week.
Next you see where the work piles up. A diary tells you what's on today. It doesn't tell you that Mondays are carrying six regular commitments and Wednesdays none, or that at quarter-end the stock count, the board report and three reviews all land on the same four people.
Think back to those 224 days at work. A chunk of every one of them is already spoken for by routine work, before any project starts or anything goes wrong. When you can see how big that chunk is, you can do something about it. Shift the monthly check so it isn't at month-end. Hand the Friday job to the team that has a quiet Friday. Sort out cover before someone goes on holiday, not the morning after.
Here's a small one that costs nothing. Don't start a new person on a Monday. Monday is when everyone is catching up from the weekend, clearing emails and sitting in the first meetings of the week, so the newcomer gets a rushed hello and a desk. Start them on a Tuesday or Wednesday. By then the people doing the induction have got themselves straight and can give it proper attention. The new starter's first impression is of a place that was ready for them and has time for them, and that impression lasts.
And you'll find a few jobs that don't belong to any particular day or any particular person. They happen when someone remembers. Keep an eye on those, because they're the ones that stop without anyone noticing.
When somebody asks
Sooner or later someone wants to know what you actually do. It might be a new director getting to grips with the place. It might be a customer's auditor asking how you know the checks get done, or your own internal audit picking out a few monthly reviews to look at.
In a lot of places the answer is a hunt. Somebody goes off, opens three folders and the shared calendar, and comes back twenty minutes later with most of a list. The work behind it might be perfectly sound. That isn't the impression it gives.
Compare that with pointing at a sheet on the wall. That's everything we do regularly, how often, and when. Pick a line, any line, and we'll get the record out.
Auditors like this for a reason. Standards such as ISO 9001 ask for internal audits and management reviews "at planned intervals", with records kept to show they happened. So one of the first things an auditor wants to see is the plan. If it's on one page they can read it in a minute and choose what to sample for themselves.
To be clear, the page doesn't prove anything was done. The records still have to be there, and they still have to be right. But it does show that someone has a grip on the routine, and that counts for a lot in the first five minutes.
Managers get the same benefit. If you can see the whole routine, you can decide what to drop, what to combine and where the team is stretched too thin. If you can't, the temptation is to call another meeting to find out. Which is how this started.
What other organisations have tried
None of this is new, and some well-known companies have gone further than a tidy-up.
Shopify started 2023 by cancelling every recurring meeting with more than two people and keeping Wednesdays free of meetings altogether. It said that took about 10,000 events, more than 76,500 hours, out of its calendars. Later that year it added a calculator to the calendar, so whoever sets up a meeting sees what it will cost before they send the invitation.
A team at Asana ran what they called "Meeting Doomsday". Everyone deleted their recurring meetings, left their calendars empty for 48 hours, then added back only the ones they missed. Many came back shorter or less often. People saved an average of 11 hours a month each.
Dropbox keeps its meetings inside four-hour blocks of "core collaboration hours" and leaves the rest of the day for getting on with things. Amazon keeps meetings small enough to be fed by two pizzas, and opens them with everyone reading a written memo in silence instead of sitting through slides.
The meeting-free day has some evidence behind it too. A study of 76 large companies in MIT Sloan Management Review found that those which kept at least one day a week clear reported higher productivity and satisfaction and lower stress.
The sums back it up. Drop one day's worth of meetings and the pace needed to get the week's work done falls from about 2.6 times normal to 2.0, and each person gets roughly 27 working days a year back. No later cut is worth as much as that first one.
Notice what these have in common. Each one starts with somebody looking at the whole calendar. You can't clear out what you haven't listed.
Five questions to try this week
- Could you write down every regular meeting your team goes to without looking at a calendar? If you can't, start there.
- Which two meetings have mostly the same people and mostly the same agenda? They're the obvious ones to merge.
- Is there a routine check that two teams both do? And is there one you suspect nobody does?
- Which day of the week has the most routine work on it, and which week of the month? Who does it fall on?
- If a new manager or an auditor asked tomorrow what you do regularly, how long would it take to pull the answer together?
Over to you
Most people already suspect they have too many meetings. What they haven't had is a way to see them all at once, and it's hard to cut something you can't see.
What's the most duplicated meeting or check you've come across, and what finally got it merged?
Sources
- Perlow, Hadley and Eun, "Stop the Meeting Madness", Harvard Business Review, July–August 2017
- ISO 9001:2015, clauses 9.2 (internal audit) and 9.3 (management review)
- GOV.UK, UK bank holidays, England and Wales, 2027
- Office for National Statistics, Sickness absence in the UK labour market: 2025
- TUC, UK workers put in £28 billion in unpaid overtime in the last year, February 2026
- Rogelberg, Leach, Warr and Burnfield, "Not another meeting!" Are meeting time demands related to employee well-being?, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2006 (summary)
- Health and Safety Executive, Health and safety statistics 2024/25
- Fortune, Shopify is cutting meetings, 3 January 2023
- Axios, The glaring cost of meetings, 13 July 2023
- Asana, Meetings are broken: Meeting Doomsday
- Dropbox, How to be productive (core collaboration hours)
- Chartered Management Institute, Four ways Amazon optimises meetings, May 2018
- Laker, Pereira, Malik and Soga, The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022
First published on the HartfellCo LinkedIn page, 9 October 2026.