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Showing posts from July, 2026

The hidden tax your organization pays for every meeting ending with “Let’s Circle Back”

  Let me do some math with you. Your weekly cross-team sync: 8 people, 60 minutes. It has been running for 11 months. Attendance is variable. Decisions are inconsistent. The agenda is usually sent the morning of, sometimes not at all. The meeting usually runs 10 to 15 minutes over. Here is what that meeting has actually cost your organization: 8 people × 1.25 hours (with overrun) × 48 weeks = 480 hours of collective human time. That is 12 full working weeks. Three months of one person’s life. At a blended fully-loaded salary of $120,000 for a senior IC or manager, you’re looking at roughly $70,000 in labor cost for a single recurring meeting over a year. Now ask yourself: what has that meeting produced? If it has produced $70,000 in value - in decisions made, alignment created, problems solved, projects unblocked - then it is worth every minute. Many good meetings are. But if it produces vague summaries, unclear follow-up, and decisions that get relitigated in Slack the next day? Y...
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