30 August 2026
There is no number — 12, 15, 20 — that is universally too many. The real question is whether your calendar leaves you enough unbroken time to do the work the meetings were about, and for most people that means at least two or three blocks of 90 minutes or more, most weeks. If your week is a lattice of 30-minute gaps between calls, you can have a light meeting load by any count and still be drowning.
A 40-minute meeting followed by a 20-minute gap followed by another meeting is not 20 minutes of work time. It's zero. Nobody opens a document, gets into it, and closes it meaningfully in 20 minutes with a hard stop on both ends. Most people need 10-15 minutes just to reload context after an interruption — a number that comes out of interruption-recovery research going back to Gloria Mark's work at UC Irvine, and it matches what anyone who's tried to write code or a proposal between calls already knows in their gut.
So the honest unit isn't meetings per week. It's contiguous free hours per week, and specifically how many of those blocks are 90 minutes or longer — long enough to write a spec, debug something real, or think about a decision instead of reacting to one.
Open last week's calendar, not next week's — the one that happened, including the meetings that ran long or got added at 8pm the night before. For each day, find every gap between events. Throw out anything under 45 minutes; that's buffer time, not work time. What's left is your real capacity.
Cut recurring meetings with no changed agenda before you cut one-off meetings with a real decision pending. A standing sync that's been the same fifteen minutes of status for six weeks is a stronger candidate for deletion than a messy, contentious planning call — because the planning call is where the actual friction of the work gets resolved, and skipping it just moves the argument into Slack threads that take three days instead of thirty minutes.
Cut meetings where you're one of eight attendees and haven't spoken in the last three occurrences. If a meeting runs fine without your voice, it will run fine without your attendance — read the recap instead. Cut meetings that exist because a decision was made in a meeting once and nobody ever asked if it should still be recurring. These are usually easy to find: they have the vaguest titles and the largest attendee lists.
Not every 15-minute call with no agenda is waste. A daily standup that runs eight minutes and surfaces one blocker a week is cheap insurance against a problem that would otherwise surface in Thursday's status report, three days later than useful. The tell isn't length or frequency — it's whether the thing it prevents (a blocked engineer sitting idle, a customer commitment made without the person who has to build it) would actually cost more than the meeting does.
A 1:1 that seems to produce no artifacts is often doing its real job invisibly — it's where someone tells you they're about to quit, six weeks before they'd otherwise say it. Cutting these to reclaim calendar space is usually a false economy: you get back 30 minutes and lose the one channel where the quiet, expensive problems actually surface.
Most people misjudge their own meeting load because they're estimating from feeling, not from the calendar. The feeling is shaped by whichever meeting was worst yesterday, not by the actual shape of the week. This is where a transcript is more useful than a memory — AVAY keeps a running note of what was actually decided in each call, so when you're deciding whether a recurring meeting still earns its slot, you can search what it produced over the last month instead of guessing from how it felt to sit through the last one.
That doesn't fix the calendar-density problem by itself — no tool schedules gaps for you — but it does remove the guesswork from the part of the audit that's usually done from vague recollection: which meetings actually generated decisions, and which have quietly become a status read-aloud nobody needed.
No single number holds across roles, but a useful rule of thumb is: if your week has fewer than two or three blocks of 90 minutes or more with no meeting in them, you have too many meetings regardless of the total count. An individual contributor with 20 short meetings and three long open blocks is often fine; one with 8 meetings and zero open blocks longer than an hour is not.
Yes, but not the way people think — short meetings are cheap individually and expensive collectively because each one costs 10-15 minutes of context reload on either side, whether it runs 15 minutes or 60. Five 15-minute meetings spread across a day can destroy more usable work time than two 90-minute ones back to back.
Bring the audit, not the feeling: show which recurring meetings you attend produced a decision or artifact in the last month, and which didn't. Asking to drop or skip the ones with no output in the last four sessions is a concrete, defensible request rather than a general complaint about being busy.
Check whether the meeting is preventing a slower, more expensive problem rather than producing a visible output — daily standups and regular 1:1s often fall here. The right test is cost of the alternative, not length of the agenda: a short meeting that surfaces a blocker or a resignation risk a week early is worth far more than its runtime suggests.
Don't count meetings — count 90-minute blocks. If your week has fewer than two or three of them, the meeting load is too high no matter what the total says, and the fix is cutting the recurring calls with no decision output first, not the shortest ones.
AVAY is a video meeting platform that transcribes the call itself — no bot joins, because there is nothing to join. Start one at avay.ai, read how each part works in the documentation, or see what it costs.