There are six types of work meetings, and every entry on your calendar is doing one of those six jobs. Once you can name which, the question of whether to keep it stops being a matter of taste.
The reason this is worth twenty minutes is that meetings get judged by how they feel. A meeting you enjoy gets defended; a meeting you dread gets targeted. Neither is a signal about whether it should exist. The status meeting you like because it is the only time you talk to that team is still a status meeting, and the review you dread may be the only thing preventing a quarterly disaster.
Sort by job instead. Then use the table.
The decision table
| Type | What it is for | Default verdict | The specific move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status | Everyone reports what they did | Async | Written update in a channel, 15-minute optional call for blockers |
| Decision | Someone leaves with authority to act | Keep | Shrink to the deciders plus the people with information |
| Working session | The work happens in the room | Keep | Protect it; these are the ones that get cannibalised first |
| Broadcast | Information flows one way to many | Async | Document or recording, plus a live Q&A that is genuinely optional |
| Review | Approve, reject, or send back | Shrink | Pre-read circulated 24h ahead; the meeting handles disagreements only |
| Relationship | 1:1s, skip-levels, onboarding | Keep | Never the first thing you cut, whatever the load |
The defaults are defaults. What follows is when each one is wrong.
Status meetings
The most common recurring meeting and the one with the weakest case. Its structure — each person reports in turn — means everyone is relevant for their own two minutes and an audience for the other twenty-five. If your calendar audit produced a high listen share, this type is where most of it lives.
Convert it: everyone posts a written update by a fixed time, and a short optional call handles anything blocked. The written version is better than the spoken one in a way people underestimate — it is searchable, it reaches the people who were not invited, and it forces a specificity that speaking does not.
When status should stay a meeting. When the team is new or newly formed and the reporting is a pretext for building the relationships that make the rest of the work possible. When something is on fire and the coordination cost of async is genuinely higher. When the team is distributed across languages and the written channel systematically disadvantages some of them. Those are real. “People won’t read it” is not — that is a management problem being solved with everyone’s Tuesday.
Daily standups are a subtype worth separating. A standup that runs under ten minutes, standing, with three questions, is not the problem this post is about. A “standup” that runs 25 minutes seated with screen shares has become a status meeting and should be judged as one.
Decision meetings
The type most worth keeping and the type most often broken.
A decision meeting is one where a specific decision is named in advance, the person who will make it is in the room, and the meeting ends with it made. Almost all of them fail on one of those three conditions. Nobody wrote down what was being decided, so the meeting discussed the topic instead. Or the decider was not present, so it became an input-gathering session and a second meeting was required.
Do not drop these. Fix them by shrinking. A decision meeting needs the decider, the people with information the decider lacks, and the people who have to execute. Everyone else is attending for visibility, which is a real need served badly by a seat in the room and well by circulated notes.
Shrinking is also where the arithmetic is on your side: a meeting’s cost scales with the number of people in it and its output usually does not, which is the one place the cost calculation is genuinely worth doing.
When a decision meeting should be async. When the decision is reversible and low-stakes. Put the proposal in writing, set a deadline, and let silence be assent. Reserve the room for decisions that are hard to undo or where you expect genuine disagreement — disagreement is the one thing that resolves faster in person than in a thread.
Working sessions
Pairing, drafting together, planning as a group, working through a design. The work is actually happening; the meeting is not about the work.
These are the most valuable meetings on most calendars and the first to be sacrificed, because they are the only type without an external obligation attached. Nobody chases you for missing a working session. That is exactly why it disappears.
Two failure modes. A working session with no artifact — no document open, no shared screen, nothing being changed — is a discussion, and discussions expand to fill the hour. And a working session with more than about five people is a meeting with an audience; the work narrows to two or three participants and the rest watch.
If your load is too high, protect these and cut elsewhere. A week with no working sessions produces individually competent work that does not fit together, and you will spend the time you saved in the review meetings that follow.
Broadcast meetings
All-hands, department updates, launch announcements, training. One person talks, many listen.
The information transfer is worse than a document — slower, unsearchable, ungrepable, and gone unless someone took notes. What broadcast meetings actually deliver is the thing a document cannot: simultaneity. Everyone learning at the same moment, and the chance to react to the room.
That is a real function, so the question is whether this broadcast needs it. Restructuring, a difficult result, a change to how people are paid — those need everyone in the room at the same time, and sending a document instead is a failure of nerve. A product update does not.
The convertible version: circulate the document, then run a genuinely optional 20-minute Q&A. “Genuinely optional” is doing the work in that sentence. If attendance is tracked, or if the leader notes who came, the session is mandatory and you have added a document to a meeting rather than replacing one with the other.
Review and approval meetings
Design reviews, budget approvals, editorial reviews, architecture reviews. Something exists and a group decides whether it proceeds.
The default failure is spending the meeting on the read. Forty minutes of a group silently reviewing a document, then ten minutes of comments. That is a reading room with a calendar invite.
The fix is not new. Circulate the material at least 24 hours ahead, require comments in the document before the meeting, and use the meeting for disagreements only — which usually turns an hour into twenty minutes and sometimes into a message saying it is approved and the slot is cancelled.
This works right up until the pre-read is not read, at which point you are back to the reading room with a worse mood. The thing that makes it stick is the chair opening with “there are no comments on this, so we’ll take it as approved and finish early” and actually doing it. Twice is enough for people to start commenting.
Relationship meetings
1:1s, skip-levels, onboarding conversations, the standing coffee with a counterpart in another team.
Never the first thing you cut. They are the least defensible on any efficiency measure and the most expensive to lose, and the cost arrives late — three months later, as a problem nobody raised because there was no low-stakes place to raise it.
There is a version worth changing, though: the 1:1 that has become a status meeting. If yours is a verbal summary of a written update, it has changed type, and it should be judged as a status meeting rather than defended as a relationship one. The fix is the agenda, not the frequency. Ask for the update in writing beforehand and use the slot for the thing that only works in conversation.
Cadence is the honest lever here. A 1:1 that moves from weekly to fortnightly, with the rule that either party can pull it forward, keeps the function at half the load. That is a legitimate ask, and it is a much better one than quietly letting them slip — which is what happens otherwise, and which reads to the other person as being deprioritised.
Using this on your own calendar
Take the meeting inventory from your audit and put one of the six labels on every row. Twenty minutes, no analysis.
Then look only at the rows labelled Status, Broadcast, or Review, where you are not the owner and not expected to speak. That set is your recoverable time — not because those meetings are bad, but because they are the ones where your specific absence is cheapest to justify. Getting out of them requires nobody to agree the meeting is worthless, only that you do not personally need to be in it. The scripts for that are the next thing, and the downgrade ladder covers the middle options when a straight exit is too expensive.
Leave Decision, Working session, and Relationship alone on the first pass, even when they are the meetings you would most enjoy losing.
Common questions
What about a meeting that is two types? It is two meetings, and that is usually why it overruns. The most common hybrid is status-plus-decision: forty minutes of reports, then a rushed decision at the end by people who have stopped concentrating. Splitting it is the fix, and it is the owner’s call, not yours.
Where do retrospectives and planning fit? Working sessions, both of them, provided something is being produced — a plan, a list of changes. A retrospective where nothing is written down and nothing changes has become a broadcast meeting with more speakers, and should be judged that way.
Isn’t “make it async” just moving the work? Sometimes, yes. Writing a good update takes longer than speaking a bad one. The trade is that the written version costs the author more and every reader less, and it keeps working after the moment has passed. For a status meeting with eight attendees, that trade is overwhelmingly worth making. For one with three, it may not be.
My manager owns most of these. What can I actually change? Type is still worth knowing, because it determines the ask. For a status meeting you request an async update. For a broadcast you ask whether attendance is expected or optional. For a review you propose a pre-read. None of those are declines, and none of them require your manager to concede anything.