How marginal gains can reduce meetings and recover some time

We’ve heard it all before about shortening meetings. Turn up on time, have an agenda, only be at relevant meetings, blah, blah. But meeting culture persists!

A recent Harvard Business Review study concludes that “71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient”. That’s no surprise. Nor is the stat, from Doodle’s State of Meetings research (19 million meetings analysed) that “poorly organised meetings cost US companies about $399bn per year”.

So, with our co-workers trying to fill up our calendars like Tetris, what’s the answer?

Marginal gains. As coined by the cycling coach Dave Brailsford. You might not be able to change the meeting culture of any company, but you can help yourself. It begins with not doing what everyone else is doing, because you’ll end up in the same place.

Let’s get to the root cause…

According to Hubstaff’s 2026 Global Trends and Benchmarks Report, “70% of meetings in the average employee’s calendar are recurring”. Recurring meetings are a huge part of the problem, because they can take up to two-thirds of your week before you even think about getting any work done.

Here’s what Kaz Nejatian, the COO of Shopify, did in 2023: cancelled every recurring meeting with more than three people. More than 10,000 meetings were deleted from calendars overnight, with employees told they could not add them back for two weeks – and only then if the meeting was truly necessary. The outside world saw this as a calendar purge. Internally, it was known as the ‘chaos monkey experiment’. And you know what? It worked.

You are not Kaz Nejatian, I get that, but change can begin with you, for you. Here’s my six-step process for making marginal gains. The target is to free up 1.5 hours per week. Think what you could you do with an extra 78 hours per year.

• Identify recurring meetings that you own: Aim to cull one, shorten one by 15 minutes and make one bi-weekly instead of weekly.
• Identify recurring meetings that someone else owns: Aim to remove yourself from one. Do you really need to be there? Again, aim to get the owner to reduce one by 15 minutes, and aim to get the owner to make one bi-weekly instead of weekly. Show them this column if it helps!