Your calendar is full of recurring meetings that made sense once but don't anymore. Everyone attends out of habit. No one wants to be the one to cancel. The meetings multiply.
Export Your Calendar
Pull a list of all recurring meetings you own or attend. Focus on weeklies and biweeklies. Ignore one-offs.
Apply The Three Questions
For each meeting, ask: (1) What decision does this meeting make? (2) Could this be async? (3) What would break if we stopped? Write the answers.
Sort Into Three Buckets
Kill: No decisions, could be async, nothing breaks. Shrink: Keep but reduce frequency or duration. Keep: Actually necessary.
Draft The Cancellation Message
"I'm canceling [meeting] because [specific reason]. If you need to discuss [topic], let's do it via [Slack/doc/email]. If this breaks something for you, tell me and we'll figure it out."
Send All Cancellations At Once
Don't trickle them out. Batch the cancellations. It signals intentionality, not laziness. People respect a deliberate calendar reset.
Wait Two Weeks
Some people will push back. Most won't. After two weeks, check: did anything actually break? Usually the answer is no. Rarely, you'll need to reinstate one. That's fine.
30% fewer recurring meetings. 5+ hours back per week. A calendar that reflects actual needs, not accumulated habits. And proof that most meetings were optional all along.
This works for most calendars. When the resistance is political, when the meetings are sacred cows, when you need to restructure how an entire organization communicates: that's a different conversation.