Скачать или смотреть The True Cost of Meetings: How to Stop Wasting £56,000 on Status Updates

That “one meeting” is rarely just one meeting.

It is a recurring purchase you are making with your most expensive resource: senior attention.

Quick recap of the maths from the video
12 leaders × 1 hour × 52 weeks = 624 hours a year. At a conservative loaded cost (salary + on-costs + overhead) of £90 per hour, that is roughly £56,000 a year.

If the output is mainly status updates, you have effectively spent £56k on information delivery.

Here is what to do next. Practical, not theoretical. Action points to reduce the Bloat Tax this week

1. Label the meeting properly
At the top of the invite, write one of these: Decision, Debate, Problem-solving, Update. If it is Update, it should not be a meeting.

2. Cut attendance to “Deciders and Doers” If someone only needs to be informed, they do not need to attend. They need a recap. Send AI notes or a short summary: decision, rationale, impact, owner, deadline.

3. Replace live updates with a 5-line async template Post before the meeting time:
Priority this week.
What changed since last week.
Blockers.
Decisions needed and by when.
Risks.

4. End every meeting with a decision log
No decision, no meeting. Write: what we decided, who owns it, when it is due, what success looks like.

5. Run a two-week experiment. Convert one recurring meeting to async for two weeks. Track: delivery speed, number of escalations, and rework. If nothing gets worse, the meeting was not doing what you thought it was doing.

If your team is burned out, do not start with resilience. Start with the calendar. A bloated meeting culture steals focus all week and pushes real work into evenings.

Comment “MEETING” and I will calculate the cost for you and send you a link to my 'three drains audit' so you can figure out exactly where your leak is.