A recurring meeting is the one item on a calendar nobody ever explicitly chooses to keep. Someone chose it once, months or years ago, for a reason that may or may not still exist. After that, it renews itself by default. Ending it is the only action anyone has to take on purpose.
The Meeting Nobody Remembers Starting
This is the quiet asymmetry that lets dead meetings pile up: continuing takes no effort, and canceling takes a decision, an email, and usually a small amount of social discomfort. So the meeting outlives its own justification by months, sometimes years, sitting on the calendar as a fossil of a problem that got solved a long time ago.
Case in Point
Shopify, January 2023
"The best thing founders can do is subtraction."
CEO Tobi Lütke authorized a company-wide "calendar purge," deleting roughly 12,000 recurring meetings involving 3 or more people in a single week, an estimated 76,500 hours returned to employees at once.1
Shopify removed the default, rather than asking employees to attend fewer meetings. Every recurring meeting had to be actively re-created and re-justified by whoever still wanted it, which flipped the asymmetry: now continuing took the effort, and disappearing was what happened automatically.
This Week: Divest
List every recurring meeting on your calendar. Next to each one, write a single sentence answering why it exists, not what it’s nominally for, but what would actually break if it stopped happening tomorrow. If you can’t finish that sentence honestly, you’ve found the one to end.
The Recurring Meeting Audit
A 1-page format for listing every standing meeting on your calendar, testing each one against a single hard question, and drafting the message that ends it.
Download the WorksheetThe goal isn’t an empty calendar. An empty calendar is just as much an accident as a full one.