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Meeting cost calculator

Put a number on the recurring meeting nobody wants to cancel. Per session, per month, per year - plus what you'd get back by trimming fifteen minutes or two attendees.

The meeting

Gross, averaged across everyone in the room.
Taxes, benefits, equipment, space. 1.25-1.4 is typical.
Reading the agenda beforehand and getting back into focused work afterwards. Set it to zero if you want the conservative number.

Cost per year

-

Per session-
Per month-
Fully-loaded hourly rate
Salary x multiplier, over 1,720 working hours a year.-
People-hours per year-
Saved by cutting 15 minutes-
Saved by removing 2 attendees-

What to do with the number

The point isn't to cancel meetings. It's to make the cost visible so the decision to keep one is deliberate. With the defaults here - a weekly hour, eight people, ten minutes of prep and recovery each - that's 448 person-hours a year, about a quarter of one person's working year. Which is fine, if the meeting is worth a quarter of someone.

Attendees are the biggest lever. Cost scales linearly with people in the room and not at all with how much each of them contributes. Plenty of recurring meetings have two or three participants and a handful of observers who could read the notes.

Prep and recovery are real. A meeting doesn't cost sixty minutes; it costs sixty minutes plus the fragmentation of the two hours around it. That's why three thirty-minute meetings scattered through a day cost far more than one ninety-minute block.

Default to a shorter slot. Meetings expand to fill the calendar invite. Moving the standing hour to forty minutes almost never removes content - it removes the drift at the start and the wandering at the end.

Give every recurring meeting a review date. The most expensive meetings are the ones that made sense two quarters ago and have quietly outlived their reason. Put a date on it, and if nobody can defend it then, it dies.

Use the honest numbers. If the calculation only justifies the meeting once you've lowballed the salary and set prep time to zero, you already have your answer.

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