How to avoid the feeling of "this meeting could have been an email"

You can tell a lot about how an organisation is functioning by looking at its calendar. Not the content of the meetings — just the shape of them. How many there are, how long they run, how often they overlap, how much of the week they consume before a single piece of substantive work has been done.

I started asking this question properly a few years ago, not because I was dissatisfied in a vague way, but because I wanted to be able to have a specific, evidenced conversation with my principal about how their time was actually being spent versus how it should be. A sense that "there are too many meetings" is not enough. A breakdown of where forty percent of the working week is going — by meeting type, by internal versus external, by recurring obligation versus actual decision-making — is a different kind of conversation entirely.

The audit doesn't need to be complicated. Export your calendar for the past four weeks as a CSV — both Google Calendar and Outlook will do this without any additional tools — and open it in a spreadsheet. You now have a list of every meeting, its duration, and its attendees. From there, the work is in the categorisation: go through and label each event by type. Strategic. Operational. Administrative. External. Internal relationship management. The categories will depend on your organisation and your principal's role, but the principle is the same: you need to group like with like before any pattern becomes visible.

Once you have categories, the numbers tend to speak for themselves. Where is the time concentrated? Which meeting types are consuming disproportionate hours relative to their actual value? Where are there consistent overlaps — meetings scheduled against each other so that something is always being deprioritised? Are there recurring commitments that have simply accumulated over time without anyone reviewing whether they still serve their original purpose?

What you're building is not a complaint. It's a briefing. A clear, quantified picture of the current state of the calendar that you can bring to your next one-to-one with a specific proposal: these meetings are earning their place, these ones warrant a review, and this is what I think we should consider changing. That distinction — between flagging a problem and presenting an analysis — is what separates reactive calendar management from something closer to genuine operational oversight.

The question worth sitting with isn't how to reduce the number of meetings. It's whether the meetings on the calendar are the right ones. The data tells you where to start looking.