Meeting cost calculator
What does your standup actually cost?
A 15-minute meeting never costs 15 minutes. Multiply it by everyone in the room and every time it happens, all year. Then find out whether it should be a meeting at all.
Result
This meeting costs
$48k a year
That's $200 every time it meets, and 480 person-hours across 240 meetings, including 0 getting back on task.
Should it be a meeting?
Replace it
Replace it with a radar issue.
Have automation open an issue each week summarizing the team's activity. Everyone comments when they get to it: what's on their radar, what they're worried about, where they need help. It surfaces problems early, which is what a standup pretends to do, without charging a meeting against everyone's most focused hours.
The rule of thumb from Open & Async: treat a meeting the way you'd treat a production incident. You check the logs before you open a war room. Start in writing, and escalate to a call when the conversation actually needs it.
Now audit your whole calendar
Export your calendar and drop the .ics file here. It totals every meeting with two or more attendees over the past year, using the cost per hour above. The file is read by this page in your browser and never uploaded anywhere.
How do I export my calendar?
- Google Calendar: Settings → Import & export → Export. Unzip the download and pick the
.icsfile for your calendar. - Classic Outlook for Windows: File → Save Calendar → More Options, then set the date range to the whole calendar and the detail to full details. New Outlook and Outlook on the web don't have a full export.
- Apple Calendar: select the calendar, then File → Export → Export.
How the math works
Meetings per year = meetings per week × 48 working weeks. Monthly counts as 12 a year.
Hours in the room = people × length × meetings per year. Cost = person-hours × cost per hour.
Annual salary becomes an hourly cost by adding 30% for benefits and overhead, then dividing by 2,080 working hours (52 weeks × 40 hours). So a $160,000 salary is $100 an hour.
Switching cost (optional) = people × 25 minutes × meetings per year. In one study of information workers, interrupted work that got picked up again the same day took about 25 minutes on average to get back to, and people usually handled a couple of other tasks in between (Mark, Gonzalez & Harris, 2005). Not all of that time is lost, and it's a flat amount per meeting whatever the length, so treat it as a rough estimate. It's off by default.
The calendar audit counts each event with two or more attendees who haven't declined, leaving out rooms, all-day events, and cancelled occurrences, over the 365 days before today. It can't tell which meetings you declined yourself, so treat it as an upper bound.