Why Recurring Meetings Are Killing Productivity (And What to Do)

Recurring Meetings Take Up Two-Thirds of Your Week. Here’s How You Can Claim Back 78 Hours Per Year:

We’ve read it all before about shortening meetings. Turn up on time, have an agenda, only be at relevant meetings, blah, blah. Yet, Harvard Business Review’s recent study still concludes with “71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient.” We didn’t need research to know this or to know that “Poorly organised meetings cost U.S. companies about $399 billion per year.” From Doodle’s State of Meetings research (19 million meetings analysed).

So, with our coworkers trying to fill up our calendars like Tetris, what’s the answer?

Marginal gains. As coined by Dave Beresford, the UK Olympic Cycling Coach. You won’t change the meeting culture of any company, but you can help yourself. It begins with not doing what everyone else is doing because you’ll end up in the same place. As Henry Ford said, with a slight change, ‘If you do what others always do, you’ll get what others get’ – moaning about a diary full of unproductive meetings.

Let’s get to the root cause…

According to Hubstaff’s 2026 Global Trends and Benchmarks Report, ‘70% of meetings in the average employee’s calendar are recurring’. Yep, recurring meetings are the problem, because they can take up to two-thirds of your week before you even think about getting any work done. Here’s what Kaz Nejatian, the COO of Shopify, did in 2023: Cancelled every recurring meeting with more than 3 people. Over 10,000 meetings were gone overnight (deleted from calendars), and employees were told that they could not add them back for 2 weeks, and only after that if the meeting was truly necessary. The outside world saw this as a calendar purge. Internally, it was known as the ‘Chaos Monkey experiment.’ And it worked.

You are not Kaz, I get that, but change can begin with you, for you. Here’s my 6-step process for making marginal gains. The target is to free up 1.5 hours per week, because ‘What could you do with 78 hours per year?’

1. Identify recurring meetings that you own: Aim to cull one.
2. Identify recurring meetings that you own: Aim to shorten one meeting by 15 minutes.
3. Identify recurring meetings that you own: Aim to change one meeting to every 2 weeks, instead of weekly.
4. Identify recurring meetings that someone else owns: Aim to remove yourself from one.
5. Identify recurring meetings that someone else owns: Aim to get the owner to reduce one meeting by 15 minutes.
6. Identify recurring meetings that someone else owns: Aim to get the owner to change one meeting to every 2 weeks, instead of weekly.

This article was written by Darren A. Smith for The Grocer. View the original article.