What a standing meeting costs

In May I added up the recurring meetings on my team’s calendar. I did it because Jun asked in standup why we always felt behind, and I did not have a better answer than “we are busy”. Here is what I found for the four meetings we hold every week.

Meeting	Length	People	Hours per month
Design standup	15 min	6	6.0
Product sync	45 min	8	24.0
Critique	60 min	6	24.0
Roadmap check-in	30 min	9	18.0

That is 72 person-hours a month, spread across six designers. It works out to twelve hours each, a day and a half of working time, before anyone has opened a file.¹

What I did about it

I did not cut any of them. I looked at the product sync, where eight people sat for 45 minutes and I could only name two who spoke at every one. We made it a written update on Monday mornings with a 20-minute call for the questions that came back. The call has run for about eleven weeks and has been cancelled three times because nobody had questions.

The critique stayed. I would defend that one. The roadmap check-in shrank to 20 minutes after I started using the meeting template and put the decision it needs at the top.

I will count again in the autumn. I suspect the number goes back up, because meetings regrow like weeds.

Footnotes

1. I counted only the meeting time itself. Preparation, context switching and the 10 minutes everyone spends getting coffee beforehand would make it higher. ↩