How I Went From 35 Meetings a Week to 18

The moment I counted

I did not realize how bad it had gotten until I actually counted. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was sitting in my third consecutive meeting, already thinking about the next two after it. I had that hollow, buzzing feeling you get when you have been in calls all day and your brain is running on fumes.

That evening, I opened my unified calendar and counted every meeting from the previous week. Not just the ones I remembered. Every standup, every 1:1, every "quick sync," every all-hands, every stakeholder update, every sprint ceremony across all three clients. The number was 35.

Thirty-five meetings in a five-day work week. That is seven meetings per day on average. At 30 minutes each (generous, since many were an hour), that was 17.5 hours of meetings. Out of a 40-hour week. Less than half my time was available for actual work. And that remaining half was shredded into fragments between calls.

The audit: keep, replace, cut

I built a simple framework. For every recurring meeting on my calendar, I asked three questions. First: does this meeting produce a decision or action item that would not happen otherwise? If yes, keep it. Second: could the outcome of this meeting be achieved through a Slack message, a shared document, or an async update? If yes, replace it. Third: if this meeting disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice within a week? If no, cut it.

I went through all 35 meetings with brutal honesty. The results surprised me. About 15 were genuine keeps. Meetings where real decisions happened, where I needed to be present and engaged. Another 10 were clear replacements. Status updates that could be a written summary. Brainstorms that could be a shared doc with comments. Demos that could be a recorded video.

The remaining 10 were cuts. Recurring meetings that had outlived their purpose. Syncs that existed because someone created them six months ago and nobody questioned them. 1:1s where neither person had anything to say but both showed up out of habit.

The uncomfortable conversations

Identifying the cuts was the easy part. Actually cutting them was harder. It meant going to people and saying, "I do not think we need this meeting anymore." That sentence is simple to type and surprisingly difficult to say out loud.

Some conversations went smoothly. "Hey, I have been thinking about our weekly sync. What if we switched to async updates in Slack and only met when one of us flags something that needs discussion?" Most people were relieved. They were also drowning in meetings and were just waiting for someone else to suggest canceling.

A few conversations were genuinely uncomfortable. One client had a standing meeting that their VP attended occasionally. Suggesting we cut it felt politically risky. I framed it differently: "Can we shift this to biweekly? That way the weeks we do meet, we have more substance to discuss." That worked.

The hardest conversation was with myself. I had to admit that some meetings I was attending out of insecurity, not necessity. I went to certain standups because I wanted to be seen as present and engaged, not because I needed the information. Letting go of those meant trusting that my work would speak for itself.

The replacement strategy

For the 10 meetings I replaced with async alternatives, I did not just cancel and hope for the best. I set up the replacement before removing the meeting. A Monday morning Slack post replacing the Monday standup. A shared Google Doc replacing the weekly status review. A 5-minute Loom video replacing the biweekly demo.

The key was making the async alternative easier than the meeting. If the replacement required more effort than showing up to a call, people would resent it and push to bring the meeting back. A two-paragraph Slack post takes three minutes to write and 30 seconds to read. A 30-minute meeting takes 30 minutes from everyone involved. The math is obvious once you make it explicit.

One month later

After four weeks of the new schedule, I counted again. Eighteen meetings. Down from 35. That is 17 fewer meetings per week, which translated to roughly 8 hours of reclaimed time.

But the number does not capture the real difference. It was not just 8 hours. It was 8 hours of contiguous, uninterrupted time. Instead of 30-minute fragments scattered between calls, I had full mornings or full afternoons with nothing on the calendar. That is when deep work happens. That is when I write the best code, produce the best analyses, and have the best ideas.

My stress dropped noticeably. I stopped dreading Mondays. I stopped feeling that panicky scramble of back-to-back calls with no buffer time. I actually had time to prepare for the meetings I did attend, which made those meetings more productive.

Not everything was perfect. One of the async replacements did not stick, and we went back to a biweekly meeting (still better than weekly). One client pushed back on reducing their standup frequency, so I compromised at three times a week instead of daily. These were fine. The goal was not zero meetings. It was fewer, better meetings with more time for real work in between.

What made it possible

I could not have done this audit without seeing all my meetings in one place. When my calendars were spread across three separate tabs, I did not even know the number was 35. The problem was invisible because the data was fragmented.

The unified view made the problem quantifiable. Quantifiable problems are solvable problems. Vague feelings of being "too busy" are not actionable. A spreadsheet showing 35 meetings, categorized as keep/replace/cut, is very actionable.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by your meeting load but have not actually counted, start there. Get every calendar into one view, count the meetings, and run the keep/replace/cut framework. The number might shock you. The solution might be simpler than you expect. manyCalendars gets all your calendars into one view in about 90 seconds, which is roughly 89 seconds faster than the audit itself will take.