That meeting is necessary
could've been an email.
Calculate the real dollar cost of any meeting in seconds. Then decide if it's actually worth it — or if a quick message would've done the job for 1/100th of the price.
Run the numbersHow much does your meeting actually cost?
Plug in your numbers. The total updates as you type. Most teams underestimate by 3–5x because they forget to multiply by everyone in the room.
Email or meeting? A 5-second sniff test.
If your meeting checks any of the right column, schedule it. If everything lives in the left, kill it before someone burns three hours on a calendar invite, prep, and follow-up.
Send the email
DEFAULT- It's a status update or progress check
- You're sharing information, not deciding anything
- The answer fits in under 200 words
- Only one or two people actually need to weigh in
- It can be answered async without losing context
- You're "just touching base"
- You'd open with "this'll be quick"
- It's a recurring sync that produces no decisions
Take the meeting
RARE- You need a real-time decision from a group
- It's a sensitive conversation (firing, conflict, reviews)
- You're brainstorming and need live energy
- You're building trust with someone new
- The async version has gone in circles for 3+ days
- Context is so messy text would take longer to write
- Multiple stakeholders need to align in one shot
- You're celebrating something real
The numbers are bleak.
Meetings ballooned after 2020 and never came back down. Below is what the most credible recent research says — every figure links to the original source.
How we calculate this
The cost-per-meeting math is straightforward. We take the average annual salary you enter and divide by 2,080 (the standard U.S. work-year: 40 hrs × 52 weeks) to get an hourly rate. Then: (hourly ÷ 60) × attendees × duration × multiplier. The default +23% multiplier approximates the loaded cost per employee — benefits, overhead, and the well-documented context-switching tax that Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine pegs at ~23 minutes of lost focus per interruption.
The "if sent as email instead" comparison assumes ~5 minutes for one person to write a clear update plus ~2 minutes per recipient to read it — a generous estimate based on average reading and typing speeds.
The live counter at the top of the page anchors to the LSE estimate of $259 billion lost annually in the U.S. to unproductive meetings — roughly $8,213 per second when averaged across the year. If you find that hard to believe, run the calculator above for a typical 30-minute, 8-person meeting at your company. Now multiply by every recurring sync on every calendar at every company in America.
Sources are linked above. None of this is precise to the dollar — the variables are too many — but the order of magnitude is well-established across decades of organizational research.
Ready to fix it? Watch an audit run.
Below is a 90-day calendar export from a typical 25-person company. Hit run and watch the triage sort every recurring meeting into kill, shrink, or keep, with the savings attached. Then run the same process on your own calendar.
Triage complete. 47% of meeting spend recoverable.
Fire Your Meetings is the full system: your calendar is a second payroll, and nobody on it has ever had a performance review. This kit runs the review, builds the termination list, and hands you the exact words. No IT approval, no calendar permissions. Works with Google Calendar and Outlook exports.
Eight ways to reclaim your week.
Every one of these is reversible. Try one this week. If nothing breaks — and nothing will — try another.
Default-decline anything without an agenda.
No agenda means no clear outcome. Reply: "Happy to join — what decisions do we need to make?" Half disappear on their own.
Cancel one recurring meeting for two weeks.
If nobody noticed, kill it permanently. If someone did, restart it — but shorter and tighter.
Rewrite weekly status meetings as a Loom or written update.
Five minutes of talking is faster to read than to listen to. People can skim. People can skip.
Block 4-hour deep work windows.
Treat focus time like a meeting with your most important client: yourself. Decline conflicts.
Cut every 30-min meeting to 20. Every 60 to 45.
Work expands to fill time. The meeting won't get worse. Your day will get better.
Make "this could be an email" socially acceptable.
Say it out loud, kindly, in your team. Permission spreads fast. So does pushback against time theft.
Limit attendees to who must decide.
Spectators add cost, not value. Send notes to the rest. They'll thank you.
Run "no-meeting Wednesdays."
One sacred day a week. Output goes up. Stress goes down. Nobody quits over it.
Send the email.
Bookmark this. Send it to the colleague who keeps booking 60-minute "quick syncs." Be the change.