Meeting Audit

Crawler-style "audit your meetings" advice tells you to cancel things. That works for a week — then the meetings come back, because nobody had a defensible reason for which ones to cut and which to keep. The skill is triage, and triage has to be specific. Every meeting on your calendar gets scored on four criteria and assigned one of four verdicts with a tailored action.

The framework is VETO. Value produced — does the meeting actually generate decisions, alignment, or unblocked work, or is it information that could be a doc? Essentiality of your presence — are you needed, or there "just in case"? Time efficiency — is the duration proportional to the output, or is half of it filler and stragglers? Outcome clarity — does anyone leave with written decisions and action items, or is it a "we discussed" meeting? Score across all four and the verdict drops out: Keep (protect it), Restructure (shorten, tighten, fewer attendees), Async (here's the specific replacement format), Kill (here's the polite decline script).

Before any of that runs you get the Meeting Tax — total hours, percentage of your week, plus a context-switch penalty of 15 minutes per meeting for the mental ramp-down/ramp-up. The number is usually larger than people expect, and it changes how the rest of the audit lands. The output is a verdict table with hours saved per category, followed by per-meeting breakdowns and replacement scripts. Reclaimed time gets blocked as deep work the same session, because unprotected free hours get re-colonised by new meetings within a fortnight.

It handles the constrained cases. Boss's standing meeting you can't decline? RESTRUCTURE: attend the first 15 minutes, exit when your topic is done. New joiner who inherited 11 recurring slots? Attend each once for firsthand VETO assessment, then run the full audit at week two. And it builds in the follow-through — 2-week check (did the async replacements actually happen?), 4-week review (has total meeting time crept back up?). Meeting creep is gravity. The audit is the resistance.