Recurring meeting audit: deleting the ones nobody will miss

Recurring meetings are created for a reason that was real at the time and then outlive it, because cancelling somebody else's meeting is socially expensive and nobody has the standing to do it. A recurring meeting audit removes the social cost by making the review scheduled and universal: everything is examined, so nothing is singled out.

What to measure first

• Total recurring hours per person per week. The number is almost always higher than anyone guesses, and it is the only figure that makes the case.
• Attendance against invitation — a meeting where a third of invitees routinely decline has already been voted on.
• Whether the last three instances produced a decision or an action. If not, it is a status broadcast and can be written.
• Whether the same people meet in another recurring slot that week, which is how two meetings become one.
• Who the meeting is actually for. Several exist only because one person wants reassurance, which is a one-to-one, not a group.

Running the recurring meeting audit

1. Pick a month and announce that every recurring meeting is under review — universality is what makes it safe.
2. Ask each owner three questions in writing: what decision does it produce, who must attend, and what would break if it stopped.
3. Cancel anything whose owner cannot answer the first question. Do not shorten it; shortening preserves the habit.
4. Halve the frequency of anything that passes but barely, and see whether anyone notices.
5. Cut invitee lists hard. Optional attendance is a polite fiction — people attend because they were invited.
6. Re-run in six months, because the list regrows and everybody knows it.

Delete rather than pause. A paused recurring meeting returns automatically when somebody clears their calendar backlog, and the pause gives it a second life it did not earn.

What to keep

Two categories survive almost every audit and deserve to. The one-to-one, because in distributed teams nothing else notices that somebody is stuck or overloaded. And the meeting where a genuine decision is made with the people who can make it — that is not overhead, that is the work. Everything between those poles is usually a written update that acquired a calendar entry at some point in the past.

Replacing what you cancel

A cancelled status meeting leaves a real gap: people did find out things in it, inefficiently. Replace it deliberately with a short written update on a fixed day, and say who writes it. Cancelling without a replacement produces a quiet fortnight followed by somebody reinstating the meeting with a stronger mandate than it had before.

Ettex Calendar makes the first measurement straightforward — recurring commitments per person, visible as a number rather than as a feeling — and the written replacement belongs in a running note per team instead of in a new invitation.