Meeting Tax
Meeting Tax is what a team’s recurring meetings cost in people’s time: the number of attendees, times the hours, times how often the meeting runs, valued at what that time costs the organisation. It’s called a tax because it is paid every week whether or not the meeting is useful, and it’s easy to raise and hard to cut.
Drafted with AI for Jay Sampat, Chief Mirror Holder · coach review pending
In practice
Meetings are the one cost most teams never budget for.
The status meeting where everyone reads out what they already wrote in the update.
Meeting Tax
How do you work out your Meeting Tax?
Multiply attendees by hours by meetings per year. An illustration: a weekly 1-hour meeting with 8 people, over a 46-week year, is 8 × 1 × 46 = 368 hours. Put a value on an hour of their time and you have its yearly cost. Add the time spent preparing and getting back into focused work, and the real figure is higher.
How do you lower it?
- Audit your recurring meetings once a quarter: keep, shrink or stop each one.
- Shrink before you stop: fewer people, half the time, or every other week.
- Replace status updates with writing, and keep meetings for decisions and hard conversations.
The full method, with a worked example, is in How much do recurring meetings cost my team?. The free Meeting Tax calculator works it out for your own calendar.
Drafted with AI · coach review pending
Related tests
- 12Meeting TaxLive
From the Question Library
Question 21 of 42
I protect my team’s time from meetings they don’t need.
Drafted with AI · coach review pending