TL;DR. A meeting costs the salary time of everyone in it, plus the fragmented hour on either side that never gets counted. Six people for an hour at a $90,000 average salary is roughly $340 once you add a conservative overhead multiplier, which is around $15,500 a year if the meeting is weekly. The switching tax makes the real figure worse. Price your own with the meeting cost calculator, decline by offering a cheaper contribution rather than a flat no, and keep the meetings that make decisions.
There is a particular silence about four minutes into a recurring meeting where everyone privately concludes it did not need to happen, and nobody says so, because saying so is socially expensive and sitting there is free.
Except it is not free. It has a price, the price is calculable, and the calculation is uncomfortable enough to change behaviour in a way that complaining never does.
The arithmetic
The standard method is simple enough to do in your head.
Take an annual salary, divide by 2,080 working hours, which is 52 weeks at 40 hours. Multiply by the number of attendees and by the duration in hours. Then apply an overhead multiplier, because an employee costs more than their salary once you count benefits, equipment, software and space. A 1.3 multiplier, meaning 30% overhead, is conservative. Plenty of organisations are at 1.5 or above.
Run it on an ordinary recurring meeting. Six people, one hour, average salary $90,000:
- Hourly rate: $90,000 divided by 2,080 is about $43
- Six people for one hour: about $260
- With a 1.3 overhead multiplier: about $340
That is one instance. Make it weekly and across roughly 46 working weeks a year it becomes about $15,500.
Fifteen thousand five hundred is not a rounding error. It is a piece of software, or a contractor for a month, or a meaningful chunk of a salary. If someone proposed a $15,500 annual subscription, there would be a review, at least two objections, and a form. The equivalent meeting gets created by dragging a rectangle on a calendar.
That asymmetry is the whole reason this exercise works. Recurring meetings are the only recurring expense in most organisations that nobody renews.
The meeting cost calculator runs this for you, including a live ticker that counts the cost up in real time during an actual meeting, and a weekly audit tab where you add every recurring meeting you attend and see the weekly, monthly and yearly totals. I would suggest running the audit tab before the ticker. The ticker is more fun and the audit is more damaging.
Why the arithmetic still understates it
Now the part the salary maths misses entirely.
A meeting does not consume its own duration. It consumes the shape of the day it sits inside.
Consider a 30-minute meeting at 14:00. On the calendar it costs 30 minutes. In practice:
- The stretch from 13:15 is spent on things you can safely abandon, because starting anything demanding is pointless with 45 minutes left
- The meeting takes its 30 minutes
- The hour after goes to re-loading whatever you were doing before, plus the two follow-up messages the meeting generated
Half an hour on the calendar, most of an afternoon in reality. And a second meeting at 10:30 does not double the damage so much as finish the job, because what is left is three unusable fragments rather than a day.
There is a well-known figure attached to this: research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine on interrupted work is widely cited for an average recovery time of roughly 23 minutes to return to a task after an interruption. That number gets quoted far more loosely than it was ever intended, and applying it directly to a scheduled meeting is an inference rather than a finding. I would not defend the precise arithmetic. The direction is not in doubt: getting back into demanding work after being pulled out of it is not instant, and every attendee pays it separately.
The context switching calculator applies that recovery-time model to your own interruption count and salary if you want to see the annual version. Broadly, if you add even a fraction of a recovery period per attendee to the meeting above, the real cost lands closer to $450 than $340, and the annual figure crosses $20,000.
Which produces the counterintuitive conclusion that when a meeting happens matters more than how long it is. A 60-minute meeting at 09:00 that leaves the rest of the day intact is materially cheaper than a 30-minute meeting at 14:00 that splits an afternoon in half. Nobody negotiates about meeting placement. Everybody negotiates about meeting length. We are optimising the smaller variable.
If you control any part of your calendar, the highest-leverage change available is stacking meetings back to back against one edge of the day and defending the resulting continuous block. The time blocking planner is a fast way to see whether that block actually exists in your week or whether you have been assuming it.
Decline scripts that do not torch relationships
Most advice here is some version of just say no, which is useless, because the reason people attend meetings they consider pointless is not ignorance of the word no. It is that a flat refusal reads as a statement about the person who invited you.
The fix is structural. Decline the attendance, never the goal. Every script below has the same three parts: acknowledge the topic matters, propose a cheaper way for you to contribute, commit to something specific with a date.
When you are optional. "This is worth deciding and I do not think I need to be live for it. Send me the notes and I will comment by Thursday morning."
When 10 minutes of it involves you. "I am useful for the pricing section only. Can we take that first and I will drop after it? Happy to be in the whole thing if the running order is awkward."
When there is no agenda. "Before I block the hour, what decision are we trying to make? If it is a status update I can send mine in writing today." This one is the highest-value question in the entire post, and it is not a trick. About half the time you get a real answer and the meeting is justified. The other half, nobody knows, and the invite quietly evaporates.
When it is recurring and has stopped being useful. "We set this up when the project was moving fast. It feels like the last few have been thin. Want to move it to fortnightly and see if we miss it?" Fortnightly first, cancellation later. Halving a meeting is a small suggestion that passes easily. Killing one is a referendum on whoever created it.
When you genuinely cannot decline. Attend and lower the cost. Turn up with the one decision you need, get it in the first ten minutes, and stop treating the remaining fifty as time you owe.
Two things not to do. Do not decline with no alternative, which reads as indifference to somebody else's problem. And do not send anyone the calculator output as an argument. Nothing makes a person defend a meeting harder than being handed a number proving their meeting is expensive. Use the figures to change what you agree to, not to win an argument you were not invited to have.
The meetings that are cheap at twice the price
Here is the honest counterpoint, and it matters, because meeting-cost content tends to slide into the position that all meetings are waste, which is both wrong and easy to disprove from experience.
A cost calculator gives you a price with no denominator. It can tell you a session cost $340 in salary time. It cannot tell you that the session killed a three-week piece of work that was pointed in the wrong direction, which is the single best $340 anybody spent that quarter.
Meetings that reliably earn their cost:
- Genuine disagreement. Two people who disagree in writing will trade documents for a fortnight. Thirty minutes with both of them talking resolves it or surfaces that it is unresolvable, which is also progress.
- Irreversible decisions. Anything expensive to undo deserves the bandwidth of real-time conversation, including the tone and hesitation that written updates strip out.
- Context transfer to someone new. New people do not know what they do not know, so they cannot ask for the document that would have answered it. An hour of conversation beats a week of reading.
- Relationship repair. Cannot be done asynchronously. Anyone who has tried knows how that goes.
- One to ones that people actually value. These look like pure overhead on a spreadsheet and are frequently the highest-return recurring hour on it.
The expensive meetings are almost always the same species: the recurring status update where everyone reports information that could have been read in ninety seconds, attended by people who have no decision to make, which continues because cancelling it would require somebody to take responsibility for cancelling it.
That is the target. Not meetings. That one.
Run the audit, then re-run it
The exercise takes about ten minutes.
- Open the meeting cost calculator and add every recurring meeting you attend to the weekly audit, with headcount, frequency and a rough average salary. It will show your weekly, monthly and yearly totals, and highlight the most expensive series.
- Rate each one honestly. The tool has a five-point rating after a timed meeting, where one star means it could have been an email and five means it was critical. After three or four weeks the pattern is not subtle.
- Take the single most expensive low-rated series and halve its frequency, using the fortnightly script above. One change, not a purge.
- Re-check the total a month later.
This belongs inside a standing weekly review rather than as a one-off act of frustration, because calendars refill by default and nobody notices the refill happening. It also pairs directly with a time audit, which will show you what the meeting-shaped fragments did to the rest of your week, and with the 80/20 analysis, which will tell you whether the hours you reclaim are landing anywhere that produces results or just being reabsorbed.
Everything in the calculator stays in your browser. No account, no signup, and the salary numbers that make it useful never leave your machine.
Price one recurring meeting this week. The number is usually enough.
Last updated: October 2026.
Written by Eusebiu, the solo founder building Loggd in public. I do contract development alongside the app, so I sit in other people's meetings and price my own hours, and I have declined exactly as badly as everyone else. I share what the aggregate data keeps showing on Threads.
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