What Did Constant Meetings Cost Me? It Cost Me Everything.

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What did constant meetings cost me? They cost me everything.

Between 2013 and 2023, I averaged 43 meetings a month in my career. The average meeting lasted 51 minutes.

That is an average of over 36.5 hours a month spent on nothing.

But that number isn’t actually true. It doesn’t include drive time or the consequences of a meeting.

I found in my own data research that I was spending a minimum of nine more hours driving to meetings, preparing for meetings, fixing technical issues on Zoom, and printing out my agendas.

I also found that, on average, one out of every six meetings that I attended created the need for another meeting.

Maybe two or three people in the meeting needed to meet privately to hash out some details before bringing them back to the rest of the group.

Maybe that meeting prompted us to meet directly with a third party to inquire about their needs.

All in all, I could conservatively state that over 45 hours a month were going directly into meetings that were not moving the mission forward or strengthening workflows.

If we only took my own hourly rate at the time and excluded the impact on others at the meeting or the economic impact of that organization stepping away from diligent work, meetings were costing me $6,750 a month in pure income (45 hours × $150 an hour).

I bought into the idea that meetings were part of being a professional, showing my dedication, staying on top of new information, and strategizing for the future.

By 2024, I had fully recognized that meetings were actually having the opposite effect on me.

Meetings were demoralizing me as a professional and demanding dedication to things that changed next to nothing.

I started realizing that everything that happened in a meeting was highly verbal, with little documentation or guidance for next steps, and I attended meeting after meeting where no real strategy was happening. Instead, I saw meetings filling social needs for validation and human connection while spiraling into a black hole of endless chatter.

The meetings that were supposed to be building stronger workflows and strengthening work connections were causing me to fall behind on projects. I was continually waiting for other people at the table to do their work so that I could then do mine.

For years, I thought the solution was to have better meetings.

Better agendas. Better preparation. Better facilitation.

None of it solved the problem.

The solution wasn’t better meetings. The solution was fewer meetings.

By 2024, I had started to eliminate meetings from my daily life.

Within 12 months, I eliminated 58% of my meetings. By 18 months, I had eliminated 91%.

Bad meetings weren’t personal. They were structural.

Once I changed the structure, everything else followed.

Within one year, my business made an additional $140,000 without taking on new clients or projects, all while working far fewer hours. All I did was eliminate the meetings.

That was a domino effect that rippled through my entire life, not just my career.

Because I had stopped allowing both standing meetings and exploratory meetings, it stopped the need for more unexpected meetings. It stopped eating away at my drive time. It stopped causing me to work into the evening and through the weekends.

My life felt like my own, and the undeniable truth is that my work was better.

I was more focused, more creative, and more energized.

The money followed without me even having to go after it.

Within 18 months of recognizing the problem, I was finally on my way to a seven-figure year as a one-person business, and I was making more money working 20-hour weeks than I ever did working 75+ hour weeks.

All work was async and documented. Emails were streamlined and detailed. Communication was crystal clear. Deadlines were always on track.

My clients didn’t know it, but after years of following their lead, I was training them to follow mine.

Eliminating meetings didn’t hurt the work.

It created space for deep work to exist. The results were undeniable to everyone.

The majority of meetings exist for the wrong reason. When I stopped feeding the monster, it finally stopped devouring my life.

Only when I realized that my life is nothing more than the time I have to live it, did I start respecting what I have left to spend.

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