Open your calendar and look at next week. Skip the one-off calls and count only the meetings that repeat. The Monday leadership sync. The weekly pipeline review. The project status that someone set up months ago and nobody has questioned since. For each one, ask a simple question: if this meeting disappeared tomorrow, what would actually break?
Be honest. For most of them, the answer is not the work. The work would keep moving. What would break is knowing. You would lose your view of what’s happening, and your team would lose their view of each other. That answer feels like a defense of the meeting. It’s actually the confession.
What a standing meeting is really for
Here’s the pattern I keep seeing. A recurring meeting is almost never where work happens. It’s where information gets carried. Someone spent the morning turning their week into bullet points. Someone else will spend the hour reading those bullet points aloud to people who needed two of them. Everyone leaves with a slightly newer picture of the company, and the price was an hour times the number of chairs.
Now ask why the carrying is necessary. Information gets hand-delivered in a room for exactly one reason: it isn’t visible where the work happens. If you could see the pipeline, you wouldn’t need the pipeline review. If the team could see who’s blocked, they wouldn’t need to go around the table asking. Every standing status meeting is a compensation for something your setup fails to show. That’s why I’ve stopped reading calendars as schedules. A calendar full of recurring meetings is an X-ray. Every gray box that repeats marks a place where the structure has a gap, and people are convening, week after week, to fill it with their own time.
This is why the usual fixes don’t hold. Maybe you’ve tried tightening the agenda, capping the meeting at thirty minutes, appointing a facilitator. The meeting gets crisper and survives, because the gap it compensates for is still there. Trim a compensation and you get a leaner compensation. The gap doesn’t care.
Make one meeting unnecessary
So here’s the move, and it isn’t ‘cancel your meetings.’ Canceling attacks the symptom, and the meeting grows back, usually under a new name. The move is quieter. Pick one recurring meeting, just one, and ask: what would have to be visible, and to whom, for this meeting to have no reason to exist?
Write the answer down. It’s usually shorter than you expect. A board where each project shows its state and its blocker. A number that updates where everyone can see it, instead of living inside a slide. A rule that decisions above a certain size get posted where the team reads, not announced in a room. Whatever it is, build that visibility first. Don’t announce a meeting cull. Don’t touch the invite at all.
Then watch. Keep the meeting on the calendar while the new surface does its work. The meeting starts running short. People say ‘we’ve all seen the board’ and skip straight to the one thing that needs an actual conversation. Attendance softens. Eventually someone asks whether you still need the full hour, and then whether you need it at all. Let it die of natural causes. A meeting that dies because it became unnecessary never grows back. A meeting you killed by decree almost always does.
What the room gives back
Two things return when a standing meeting dies this way. The first is time, and not just the hour in the room. A status meeting taxes the whole day around it: the morning spent preparing the update, the attention spent performing it, the real work parked because the meeting was coming. The second is subtler. When information lives in a shared place, people stop waiting for the weekly moment to learn things. They act when things change. Problems surface on the day they occur, not on the day they’re recited.
And the meetings that survive get better, because a room that isn’t reading status out loud can finally think together. Disagreement, decisions, movement. That’s the fun coming back, and it’s the performance too, arriving in the same moment because they were never separate things. Notice what you didn’t do. You didn’t coach anyone on meeting discipline. You didn’t hire better communicators. Same people, same work. You changed what they could see.
So carry this: never fight a recurring meeting head-on. Ask what it’s compensating for, build the visibility it exists to replace, and let the calendar clear itself. Your standing meetings are your setup confessing what it can’t show. Fix the setup, and the confessions stop.