The meeting you should cancel
Eight people. One hour. Nothing decided.
Meetings multiply. They become habit. The weekly standup that made sense with four people now has twelve attendees and no agenda. The check-in that took 15 minutes now takes an hour. Time is the one resource you can't make more of - and meetings are where it goes to die.
The scenario:
You want to audit and reduce meeting load across your team.
The prompt:
You're auditing meeting effectiveness.
Create an analysis framework that:
- Lists all recurring meetings with attendee count and duration
- Calculates total hours per week consumed by meetings
- Evaluates each meeting: purpose, outcomes, necessity
- Categorises: keep as-is, reduce frequency, reduce attendees, convert to async, eliminate
- Designs async alternatives where appropriate
- Establishes meeting hygiene rules going forward
Include a decision tree for "should this be a meeting?" and an agenda template.