Most companies can reduce their meeting costs by 30-40% without losing any meaningful collaboration. The waste isn't in the meetings themselves — it's in the wrong people, wrong duration, and wrong format. Here are seven strategies that work.

1. Enforce the 2-Pizza Rule for Attendees

If you can't feed the group with two pizzas, the meeting is too big. Every person beyond the essential participants adds cost while reducing the quality of discussion. Research on group dynamics consistently shows that groups larger than 7 produce worse decisions than smaller groups.

Action: For every recurring meeting, review the invite list and ask: who actually speaks? Who just listens? Move the listeners to a "meeting notes" distribution list instead. A 10-person meeting cut to 5 people saves 50% instantly.

2. Default to 25 and 50 Minutes

Meetings expand to fill the time allotted. A 30-minute meeting will take 30 minutes even if the content only needs 15. Default to 25-minute and 50-minute meetings instead of 30 and 60. The 5-10 minute buffer gives people time to transition without the meeting itself stretching.

Companies that adopt this practice report meetings ending early more often, which compounds into significant time savings across the organization. Google famously uses "speedy meetings" as a default calendar setting.

3. Require a Written Agenda or Cancel

No agenda, no meeting. This single rule eliminates a surprising number of unnecessary meetings because the organizer realizes they don't have enough substance to fill an agenda — which means the meeting didn't need to happen.

A good agenda isn't "discuss project status." It's "decide whether to launch feature X by March 1 (15 min), review blocked items from sprint (10 min), align on Q2 hiring plan (5 min)." Specific outcomes with time boxes.

4. Institute Meeting-Free Days

Shopify eliminated 322,000 hours of meetings in a single year by canceling all recurring meetings with more than 2 people. That's an extreme approach, but even one meeting-free day per week gives every employee a guaranteed block of uninterrupted focus time.

The most common implementation is "No Meeting Wednesday" or "Focus Friday." The key is making it company-wide and enforced, not optional. One person scheduling over the meeting-free day breaks it for everyone.

5. Replace Status Meetings with Async Updates

The single highest-ROI change most teams can make. Status meetings — where people take turns reporting what they're working on — are the most expensive way to share information that could be a shared document or Slack post.

Replace them with a daily written check-in (3 questions: what did you finish, what are you working on, what's blocking you) and only meet synchronously to discuss blockers. Most teams that make this switch save 2-4 hours per person per week.

6. Time-Box Every Agenda Item

Without time boxes, the first topic always eats the meeting. A 60-minute meeting with 4 agenda items will spend 40 minutes on item 1 and rush through the rest. Assign specific minutes to each item and appoint a timekeeper.

If a topic needs more time than its box, schedule a separate focused discussion with only the people who need to be involved — don't hold the entire group hostage.

7. Make Meeting Costs Visible

The most powerful change is simply making the cost visible. When a team sees that their weekly planning meeting costs $450 per session — $21,600 per year — they naturally start optimizing. Can we do this biweekly? Can we cut 3 people from the invite? Can we do 25 minutes instead of 60?

Use our meeting cost calculator to calculate the cost of your top 10 recurring meetings. Share the results with your team. The conversations that follow will do more to reduce meeting waste than any top-down policy.

The Compound Effect

None of these strategies requires radical change. Cutting 2 people from 5 meetings, shortening 3 meetings by 10 minutes, and replacing 2 status meetings with async updates — that alone can save 15-20 hours per week across a team of 10. At $50/hour average, that's $36,000-$48,000 per year redirected from meetings to actual work.