A founder of a 33-person firm blocked an entire Tuesday in January to audit the team’s meeting load. He counted 28 recurring weekly meetings across the leadership group plus 19 working-team meetings. Total: 47 recurring meetings every week. He attends 14 of them. He decided to delete five from his own diary and felt guilty about it.
None of the work the five meetings were supposedly doing has noticeably suffered. He has not yet looked at the other 42.
Why does the meeting load grow without anyone noticing?
Recurring meetings get added in response to specific problems and rarely get removed when the problem is solved. A status meeting set up because a project went off-track in 2023 is still on the calendar in 2026. A coordination meeting between sales and operations created when a customer was unhappy is still happening four years later.
A founder weekly check-in with each direct report becomes the calendar default and rarely gets reviewed for whether the format still serves either side. The accretion is silent. Each meeting individually justifies its existence. Together they consume four to seven hours of the leadership team’s week and the founder’s calendar fills with recurring slots that crowd out strategic time. The audit is the cheapest intervention available. Most founders are surprised by the count; most are also surprised by how few of the meetings produce identifiable outputs.
The audit
List every recurring meeting on the calendar: day, time, duration, attendees, stated purpose, actual output. Count them. The total surprises everyone. Then categorise each meeting into one of four buckets. Status meetings: information shared, no decision required. Problem-solving meetings: clear issue, agenda, decisions produced. Coordination meetings: cross-functional alignment that genuinely needs to happen synchronously. Founder meetings: approval or decision moments where the founder is the bottleneck.
The status meetings and the founder-bottleneck meetings are the cull targets. The status meetings can usually be replaced by an asynchronous channel (a written summary, a recorded Loom, a dashboard reference). The founder meetings need redesign rather than deletion: either the founder transfers the decision (using the authority matrix) or the cadence changes so the decision happens inside the L10. Either way, the standalone meeting goes.
The cull rule
If a meeting has no clear output (decision, coordination, escalation), it gets deleted. If a meeting has no agenda and runs as “let’s all get together and see what comes up,“ it gets deleted. If a meeting is a status update that could be a written summary, recorded video, or dashboard reference, it gets deleted. The rule is mechanical.
Edge cases get the benefit of the doubt for one cycle: skip the meeting once and see what breaks. If nothing breaks, delete it permanently. Typical reduction is 30 to 50 percent of recurring meetings with no negative impact on the business. The work the meeting was supposedly doing either was never happening at the meetings (the meeting was theatre) or is already happening through a more appropriate channel. Founders who do this audit honestly recover four to seven hours of their week immediately. Their leadership team recovers more.
The redesigned cadence
The meetings that remain are redesigned around the cadence framework. Daily huddles for tactical alignment and blocker surfacing. Weekly L10s for problem-solving and strategic alignment at leadership level. Monthly reviews for trend-checking and course correction. Quarterly off-sites for strategy and rocks reset. Each layer has a distinct purpose; nothing duplicates. The redesigned meeting load is typically 8 to 12 recurring meetings per week for the leadership team and 4 to 6 for individual working teams.
The cadence calendar makes the redesign sticky. List every remaining meeting with day, time, duration, attendees, owner, and standard agenda. Publish in a shared space. Review quarterly. Once published, the cadence becomes the default. The “let’s set up a quick weekly to discuss X“ requests get held against the cadence; if X is genuinely a separate cadence, the meeting earns its place. If X belongs in an existing cadence, the meeting is folded in.
The four meeting hygiene rules
Start on time. Meetings that start late teach the team that on-time attendance is optional. End on time. Meetings that run long teach the team that schedules are flexible and decisions are not urgent. Decisions captured. Every decision made in the meeting is written down and published within one hour. To-dos tracked. Every commitment is assigned an owner and a deadline, and completion is verified in a subsequent meeting.
Each rule sounds trivial. Together they shift the meeting culture inside six weeks. Founders who hold these four rules find the team’s punctuality improves, the meeting tone tightens, decisions get acted on, and the volume of “what did we decide last week?“ emails drops to near zero. The discipline is unglamorous and the impact is large.
The asynchronous-by-default principle
If information can be conveyed in writing, recorded video, or a shared document without live discussion, it should be. Status updates are asynchronous. Detailed proposals are shared as documents before the meeting, not presented in the meeting. Decisions that need to be made are put in writing with the options and the reasoning, reviewed asynchronously before the meeting.
The meeting is used to surface disagreement and make the final call, not to introduce the issue for the first time. The principle requires upfront discipline. Writing a decision proposal is harder than presenting it. Recording a status update is harder than turning up to a meeting. The trade-off is that the audience reads or watches in their own time, the meeting is shorter and more focused, and the decision is better documented. Firms that adopt this principle typically find their leadership team’s writing quality improves measurably and the volume of synchronous time drops by 20 to 40 percent.
The shadow-meeting problem
Critical decisions get made in corridor conversations, pub after-work debriefs, or DMs before the formal meeting. The formal meeting then becomes theatre where everyone pretends to be making the decision they have already made offline. This is usually driven by the founder’s habit of talking to people individually about decisions before the meeting.
The solution is for the founder and the team to move toward the practice that decisions are made in the meeting, not before. If pre-discussion is needed for context-setting, it happens within the published agenda. “Item 3, customer service redesign: I have circulated the proposal. Let’s spend five minutes on clarifying questions, then we decide.“ This brings the pre-discussion into the meeting rather than letting it splinter. The founder also has to stop one-to-one pre-meetings on agenda items. The instinct is “I want to know where each person stands before the meeting.“ The team reads that as “decisions are made in the corridors, not in the room.“
What to do this week
Pull your calendar and the leadership team’s calendars. Build a one-page list of every recurring meeting: day, time, duration, attendees, stated purpose, actual output. Categorise each one into status, problem-solving, coordination, or founder-bottleneck. Mark the cull candidates. Send the list to the leadership team and ask which ones they would defend if cut.
Run the cull on the next two weeks. Skip the cull-candidate meetings, watch what breaks. Whatever breaks, redesign or restore. Whatever does not break, delete permanently from the calendar. The recovered time, for you and the team, is the immediate dividend. The hygiene rules and the asynchronous default come next, once the calendar has been pruned.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on what to cull and what to keep, book a conversation.
