Audit your recurring meetings: keep, change or cancel each one

Why audit standing meetings

Recurring meetings outlive their purpose because nobody owns the question of whether they should continue. An audit puts that question on the calendar once a quarter.

There is evidence that fewer meetings can help. In MIT Sloan Management Review, Benjamin Laker and colleagues report surveying 76 companies, each with over 1,000 employees, that introduced one to five no-meeting days a week.

With one meeting-free day a week, they report that autonomy, communication, engagement and satisfaction improved, while stress and micromanagement fell. That supports cutting meetings with care. It doesn't tell you which of your meetings to cut.

Before: list every meeting and its recent output

Start with an inventory, not opinions. Look at the next four weeks of your calendar and write down each meeting that repeats.

Name, organizer, cadence and length.
Who attends, and who regularly sends apologies.
What the last three or four sessions produced: decisions, assigned actions or information nobody could get another way.
The meeting's stated purpose, if it has one written down.

The audit worksheet

Score each meeting on the same five questions. Write a short answer, not a number, so the reason stays visible when you announce the change.

Criterion	Question to answer	Warning sign
Purpose	Can the organizer state in one sentence what this meeting is for?	The purpose is "to stay aligned" with nothing more specific.
Output	Did recent sessions end in decisions or assigned actions?	The last three sessions produced only status updates.
Attendees	Does everyone invited contribute or need to hear it live?	Several people attend only to listen, or skip it often.
Cadence and length	Would the work suffer if it met half as often or for half as long?	Sessions often end early or repeat last week's items.
Alternative	Could a written update, shared notes or a smaller group do the job?	The same content already exists in a document or channel.

Decision rules: keep, change or cancel

Agree the rules before you score, so the outcome doesn't depend on who argues hardest.

Keep: the purpose is clear and recent sessions produced decisions or actions that needed people together.
Change: the purpose holds but cadence, length or attendees don't fit. Cut the frequency, shorten it or trim the invite list.
Cancel: no clear purpose, or the output could come from a written update. Name what replaces it.
Trial: when the group disagrees, change the meeting for four to six weeks and check whether anything was missed.

During: review with each organizer

Go through the worksheet with each meeting's organizer, not on their behalf. They know what the meeting does that the calendar can't show.

Decide one change per meeting and write down the reason. Agree how you'll judge the trial, such as whether decisions still get made on time.

After: announce the change and what replaces it

People accept a cancelled meeting more readily when they know where its work went. Send one short message per change:

What changes, and from which date.
Why, in one sentence from the worksheet.
Where the work goes now: a written update, a smaller meeting or a shared notes page.
When you'll review the trial, and how to raise a problem before then.

Example: a weekly team sync

For example, a ten-person team has a 60-minute weekly sync (fictional example). The last four sessions were status round-robins with no decisions. Two people rarely attend.

The team changes it to 30 minutes every two weeks, for decisions only. Status moves to a written update the day before. After six weeks, they check whether any decision was delayed.

Running the audit in Bridge

The Meetings page has a Calendar view of your upcoming, live and completed meetings. Select an upcoming meeting to open its brief, or a completed one to open its recap.

Each recap's notes include a summary, decisions and follow-ups. Open the last few recaps of a recurring meeting to fill in the Output column. Search matches meeting titles, and the date filter narrows the range.

Type a new label name, such as "audit Q4", to create a custom label, then filter the Meetings list by it. Completed meetings in the Calendar view are the ones captured with Bridge, so check your own calendar for any others.

Sources & further reading

Keep readingBuild a decision log that stays useful across meetings →