Monthly recurring meetings

Monthly recurring meetings is the total number of standing, repeating meetings on your calendars each month, often expressed as the person-hours they consume. A weekly one-hour standup with eight people is four meetings a month, but thirty-two person-hours a month once you count everyone in the room. Counting the series alone understates the load. Counting the person-hours shows the real cost.

The metric matters because recurring meetings accumulate quietly. A new standing meeting is easy to add and almost never removed, so the fixed load drifts upward year on year while nobody decides to let it. By measuring it as a single number, you make the invisible cost visible and you can hold it to a budget the same way you would hold any other recurring expense.

Unlike a one-off meeting, a recurring meeting is a commitment that compounds. Adding a thirty-minute weekly sync for six people commits 156 person-hours a year, every year, until someone cancels it. Monthly recurring meetings treats those commitments as a stock to manage, not a series of isolated calendar entries.

Calculate the load by walking every recurring series on the shared calendars and multiplying its frequency, duration, and headcount, then summing across all series. The count of series is a useful secondary number, but the person-hours total is the figure that reflects the real demand on the team.

1. 1

   Meetings per month

   Convert each series to a monthly frequency. A weekly meeting is roughly 4.3 instances a month, a fortnightly one about 2.2, a daily standup about 21 working days. Use the actual recurrence rule, not a rough guess.

2. 2

   Average duration

   Use the scheduled length in hours. Where meetings routinely overrun, use the real length rather than the calendar block, because the overrun is part of the load people actually bear.

3. 3

   Average attendees

   Count the people who actually attend, not the full invite list. A meeting invited to twenty but attended by six costs six person-hours per instance, and the gap between invited and attended is itself a signal worth tracking.

4. 4

   Sum across all series

   Multiply frequency by duration by attendees for each series, then add every series together. The total is the monthly person-hours your organisation spends in standing meetings before any ad hoc meeting is booked.

Express the result two ways. As an absolute, the total person-hours per month sets the budget. As a ratio, divide it by total available working hours to get the share of capacity consumed by standing meetings. A team of ten with 1,600 available hours a month spending 320 in recurring meetings has committed 20 percent of its capacity before a single new task begins.

A metric tree decomposes the total meeting load into the three levers that create it and traces each back to the decisions that set it. This turns a vague sense that there are too many meetings into a precise view of which series, which length, and which attendee lists are driving the cost.

The first level splits the load into the number of series, the duration per series, and the headcount per series, because the total is simply their product summed across the calendar. Each branch then decomposes further. Series count breaks into meetings by purpose, status updates against decision-making against information sharing. Duration breaks into scheduled length and overrun. Headcount breaks into required attendees against optional ones who attend out of habit.

Decomposed this way, the tree tells you exactly where the load lives. If status-update series dominate the count, the fix is to replace them with written updates. If overrun dominates duration, the fix is tighter facilitation. If optional attendees dominate headcount, the fix is to make attendance genuinely optional and mean it.

There is no universal number, but the share of working capacity consumed by standing meetings is a useful benchmark because it normalises across team size. The right level depends on the type of work. Coordination-heavy roles can sustain more standing meetings than deep-focus roles, where the same load destroys the long uninterrupted blocks the work needs.

Read your figure against the kind of work the team does, not against a single ideal. A scrum master at 30 percent is doing their job. A senior engineer at 30 percent has lost the focus blocks their work depends on. The benchmark sets the expectation for the role, and the distance from that expectation is what you act on.

Reducing the load means cutting from the branch that contributes most, not trimming evenly across the calendar. Retire series that no longer earn their place, shorten the ones that overrun, and tighten attendance on the ones that genuinely matter.

The tree approach starts by finding which lever carries the most hours. If status-update series dominate the count, retiring them returns the most time. If overrun dominates duration, facilitation discipline returns more than cancelling anything.

KPI Tree lets you model the load by connecting each branch to the team and the owner who controls it. Team leads own the series their group runs. The accountable owner on each branch is pushed an alert when the recurring meeting load rises above its agreed budget, so a creeping calendar is caught and reviewed rather than absorbed quietly until the team has no focus time left.

1. 1

   Counting series instead of person-hours

   A count of standing meetings hides the real cost. Two series with the same name can differ tenfold in load once you multiply by duration and attendees. Always measure in person-hours.

2. 2

   Using the invite list rather than attendance

   Counting everyone invited overstates the load and hides the people who quietly skip. Use actual attendance, and treat the gap between invited and present as its own signal.

3. 3

   Ignoring overrun

   Calendar blocks understate meetings that routinely run long. The overrun is real load people bear, so measure the time meetings actually take, not the time they were scheduled for.

4. 4

   Treating all meeting time as equal

   A decision meeting that unblocks ten people is not the same as a status meeting that could have been an email. Decompose by purpose before cutting, or you will remove the meetings that earn their place and keep the ones that do not.

5. 5

   Letting series live forever

   The load creeps because recurring meetings are added easily and removed almost never. Without a review date, every series becomes permanent, and the calendar fills until there is no room left to think.