We cut all recurring meetings for 30 days.

We had 11 recurring meetings on the calendar. Total time cost across a team of 9 was roughly 34 person-hours per week. We cancelled all of them for 30 days and replaced them with a single written update thread.

What happened:

• Total meeting hours dropped from 34 to 4 per week (one weekly sync we kept)

• Shipping velocity stayed flat for the first 2 weeks, then went up

• Two things broke: a handoff between design and engineering stalled for 6 days, and a customer issue sat unresolved for 3 days because nobody knew who owned it

• Written updates were longer than expected. People spent 20 to 30 minutes writing them, roughly 4 hours per person per week

The net was positive but not because meetings are bad. It was because most of our meetings existed to transfer information, and information transfer does not need to be synchronous. The two things that broke were both coordination problems, not information problems. Those need a person, not a document.

We now keep 2 recurring meetings: one for coordination, one for decisions. Everything else is written.

What recurring meeting on your calendar would you defend if someone tried to cancel it?