Recurring meetings do not get scheduled. They get inherited. Someone set one up for a real reason, the reason expired, and the invitation carried on without it, because deleting a calendar event requires a person to decide it should not exist and nobody is assigned that job.
This is not a productivity complaint. It is a structural one. Meetings have a default of continuing. Everything else in a working week has a default of stopping.
A test that takes ten seconds
Before the next occurrence, answer one question: what changes as a result of this meeting that could not change without it?
There are only a few good answers.
- A decision gets made that needs more than one person in the room to make.
- Something gets said that people would not write down.
- A relationship gets maintained that the work depends on.
If the honest answer is “everyone finds out what everyone else is doing”, that is a note. It was always a note. It has been a note for eleven months.
The three costs nobody counts
The obvious cost is the hour. It is also the smallest one.
The second cost is the fragmentation. An hour in the middle of an afternoon does not remove an hour, it removes the afternoon, because neither of the remaining blocks is long enough to start anything in.
The third cost is the preparation debt. Every recurring meeting generates a small, silent obligation to have something to say. That obligation gets paid in the twenty minutes before, out of a different piece of work.
What replaces it
The failure mode of cancelling a meeting is replacing it with nothing, discovering three weeks later that the meeting was load-bearing after all, and reinstating it permanently with a chastened air.
The thing it was carrying is usually one of two shapes:
- A state update. Someone needs to know what moved. This is a written artefact, produced once, read asynchronously. It is strictly better in writing because it is searchable later.
- An unblocking. Someone is stuck and the meeting was the only reliable moment they could raise it. This is not a note. This is a shorter, more frequent, opt-in conversation, and cancelling the long one without creating the short one is how teams get quietly worse.
Separate the two before you cancel anything. Most recurring meetings are eighty per cent the first and twenty per cent the second, and it is the twenty per cent that bites.
The handover nobody writes
The related failure is the handover. A person goes on leave, and the knowledge that lived in their head goes with them, because writing it down was never anyone’s explicit task and was always somebody’s implicit one.
The pattern that works is boring: a standing document per area of responsibility, updated whenever something surprising happens, never updated on a schedule. Schedules produce padding. Surprise is a good trigger because it correlates with the thing actually being worth writing down.
None of this requires software. It requires somebody deciding that the default should be stopping rather than continuing, and then doing the small unpleasant work of cancelling things.