How to optimize and review recurring meetings

In many organizations, recurring meetings that were once necessary continue out of inertia. In a survey Atlassian published in 2024 (covering about 5,000 knowledge workers across 4 continents), 72% of meetings were rated "ineffective", and 78% of respondents said they had so many meetings that it was hard to get their own work done. Reviewing and optimizing recurring meetings regularly pays off in the productivity of the whole team.

Criteria for reviewing a recurring meeting

If even one of the following criteria applies, you should consider canceling the recurring meeting or changing its format.

Optimizing frequency

A weekly meeting that keeps going despite a thin agenda every time is worth trying every other week. The key when lowering frequency is to set up a way to supplement it with asynchronous communication at the same time. With that supplement in place, there is room to halve meeting time while keeping the quality of information sharing.

Optimizing length

Shortening the default meeting length is one of the easiest optimizations to introduce. An experiment by Bluedorn and colleagues (1999) reported that seated meetings took 34% longer than standing meetings, with no difference in decision quality. The spread of the stand-up meeting format (15 minutes or less) owes a lot to this property of not losing quality when shortened.

Optimizing participants

Amazon's "two-pizza rule" (keep participants to a number that two pizzas can feed) is famous, but recurring meetings call for even stricter thinking. The "rule of 7" presented in Bain & Company's "Decide & Deliver" (2010) holds that once a decision-making group exceeds 7 people, each additional person lowers decision effectiveness by about 10%.

Split participants into 3 tiers, "required", "optional", and "for information only", and give optional participants the minutes instead. This makes it easier to set a no-meeting day and also helps in preventing meeting fatigue.

Running a quarterly review

Optimizing recurring meetings is not a one-time job; it is important to run a review cycle every quarter. Concretely, ask every participant of each recurring meeting, "What would go wrong if this meeting disappeared?", and treat meetings that get no clear answer as candidates for cancellation. Keeping in mind when to use asynchronous communication instead, narrow recurring meetings down to the situations that truly need synchronous discussion.