Answer 6 quick questions about your upcoming meeting. We will tell you whether it is worth the salary cost or if everyone's time would be better spent elsewhere.
If you decide to keep the meeting, at least know the price tag.
Open Meeting Cost Calculator →Atlassian's research found that 80% of workers believe they would be more productive with fewer meetings. Meanwhile, only 11% of meetings get rated as "highly productive" by the people attending them. The disconnect is massive.
The problem is not that meetings are inherently bad. It is that most organizations default to scheduling a meeting when a Slack message, an email, or a shared document would accomplish the same thing faster and cheaper. Shopify recognized this pattern and famously purged 474,000 recurring meetings from their calendars in 2023, building an internal meeting cost calculator to make the expense visible before canceling.
We built this quiz based on the decision frameworks that workplace researchers and productivity experts consistently recommend. The questions map to the specific factors that research links to whether a meeting will be productive or wasteful: the need for real time interaction, the presence of a clear decision, the size of the invite list, and whether an agenda exists.
A 30 minute meeting with 6 people earning an average of $85,000 per year costs roughly $159 in loaded salary. If it is a weekly recurring meeting, that is $8,268 per year. For a single meeting. If that meeting could have been an email that took 5 minutes to write and 2 minutes to read, the organization wasted over $8,000 annually on what is essentially an expensive group email reading session.
Scale this across a typical 50 person company with dozens of recurring meetings and the annual waste runs into six or seven figures. Use our meeting cost calculator to see the exact numbers for your specific situation. Our guide to reducing meeting costs covers seven practical strategies for cutting this waste. And our agenda template ensures that the meetings you do keep are structured for maximum value.
If you need a faster mental model than the quiz above, run your meeting through these three questions in order:
Does this require real time back and forth? If the entire purpose could be accomplished by sharing information and receiving comments asynchronously, it is an email or a document. Meetings are for synchronous discussion where people need to react to what others just said.
Is there a specific decision to be made? Meetings without a decision at the end are usually status updates in disguise. Status updates belong in Slack or a shared doc, not in everyone's calendar. If you cannot name the decision that needs to happen, do not schedule the meeting.
Would fewer than 3 people do? The larger the invite list, the more likely the meeting is a waste for most attendees. If 2 or 3 people can resolve what you need to resolve, do that. A focused 3 person conversation is almost always better than a 10 person meeting where most people are just there "in case."
The test most people fail: When you imagine canceling the meeting, what actually goes wrong? If the answer is "nothing specific," that is your quiz answer without needing a quiz.
Not every meeting is waste. Some things genuinely require synchronous, high bandwidth conversation. Complex negotiations work better in person. Sensitive 1 on 1 conversations (feedback, difficult news, relationship repair) should almost never happen async. Brainstorming sessions with creative tension benefit from the energy of real time response. Emergency incident response during outages. Customer calls that build relationship trust.
The honest answer is that most recurring internal meetings fall into none of these categories. They are status updates, information sharing, or habit. Those are the meetings this quiz is designed to identify.