Forty hours in a week, and fourteen of them belonged to one recurring meeting. I counted, calendar block by calendar block, for the whole quarter, and the number held steady week after week. A Tuesday status sync with eleven people on the invite, most of whom sat through the full hour and said nothing.
That meeting existed for a reason once. Eighteen months earlier, a deployment slipped through three teams without anyone flagging a broken dependency until it hit production, and the postmortem's one durable output was a standing sync meant to catch exactly that kind of gap before it shipped.
It caught almost nothing after the first two months. The actual blockers surfaced in Slack threads and one-on-ones hours before the meeting ever happened, and the sync itself became a status report read aloud to people who had already read the same update in a different channel that morning.
Three other directors ran the same calendar count when I mentioned mine in a leadership sync of our own. Two of them found a nearly identical pattern, a recurring meeting born out of a real incident that had outlived the problem it was built to solve by well over a year.
None of us had noticed, because nobody schedules an hour to check whether last year's fix is still earning its slot on the calendar. A one-on-one that gets cancelled draws a complaint within the day. A standing meeting that stops mattering can run for quarters before anyone questions why it is still there.
I cut the invite list from eleven to four and replaced the live status round with a written update posted the night before. The call itself became fifteen minutes, reserved only for the one blocker that could not wait for async. Nobody on the smaller list has asked for the old format back.
One senior engineer did push back, and the pushback was fair. The old meeting had one working part. It forced two teams that rarely spoke outside of it to say something out loud in front of each other once a week, and a written update does not replicate that particular kind of friction.
So the fifteen minutes stayed. The written update was never meant to replace it; it sits alongside it, doing a smaller and more honest job than the hour used to.
Every manager on the team now blocks one hour a quarter to run the same count on their own calendar. The number is not always big. Some quarters it turns up nothing worth cutting. It remains the only exercise that catches a meeting nobody remembers agreeing to.