We Cancelled 32 Recurring Meetings for a Week. Eight Were Missed.

I once proposed to a company that they cancel every single recurring internal meeting for one week, really all of them. The first reaction was panic. “That’s impossible,” the managers said, “we won’t know what’s going on any more.” I asked whether they knew what was going on after those meetings. The room went quiet.

So we tried it: 32 recurring appointments, cancelled for one week. By the end of the week, exactly eight of them had actually been missed. The other 24 disappeared without anyone noticing a difference. No project slipped, no decision was left hanging, no customer complained.

What changed instead

People suddenly had time to think, to work, and for the conversations that were genuinely needed rather than the ones that simply lived in the calendar. We reinstated the eight missed meetings afterwards. The other 24 stayed cancelled.

Busy is visible. Productive is not.

A full calendar is not proof of productivity. More often it is a sign that someone is not protecting their time. We confuse busyness with performance with remarkable reliability, probably because busyness is visible and performance is not: whoever has many appointments looks important, and hardly anyone asks whether anything actually gets created in them.

• Run the test. Cancel recurring meetings for one week and count which ones are actively missed.
• Give every survivor a job. A meeting without a decision to make or a conflict to resolve is a status email.
• Protect the freed hours. The point is deep work and the conversations that matter, not empty calendars.

The simple question to start with: which of your recurring meetings would genuinely be missed if they silently disappeared next week?

Confusing the visible with the important is a measurement trap of its own, which we unpack in The Difference Between KPIs and Metrics in R&D.

If you recognise your own organisation in this story, get in touch. The first 90 minutes of consultation are free.