5 Signs Your Meetings Are a Waste of Money (And How Much They're Really Costing You)

Do You Know How Much Your Meetings Are Actually Costing?

"Another meeting..." Sound familiar?

Most of us have a vague sense that some meetings are a waste of time. But "a waste of time" stays abstract until you put a number on it. So let's do that.

Take an engineer earning an average salary — say, around ¥5 million a year. That works out to roughly ¥2,400 per hour. A meeting with five people running for one hour costs ¥12,000. Run that same meeting every week for a year and you're looking at over ¥600,000 — for a single recurring meeting.

Now think about how many meetings are on your calendar.

5 Signs Your Meetings Are a Waste of Money

See how many of these ring a bell.

① The recurring meeting that never reaches a conclusion Every week, one hour, ending with "let's revisit this next week." Six months in, that's 26 sessions. For a five-person team at ¥2,400/hour, that's over ¥310,000 with nothing to show for it.

② The presentation where someone reads the slides out loud The document exists. Everyone in the room has it. Reading it aloud word-for-word doesn't add information — it just adds time. Async reading before the meeting, or a recorded walkthrough, would accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time.

③ The meeting you were invited to "just in case" No speaking role. No decision to make. Someone added you to the invite because you might be tangentially relevant. You sit there for an hour. The person who scheduled it thought nothing of it. Your hour is still gone.

④ The 30-minute problem booked into a 60-minute slot Parkinson's Law in action: work expands to fill the time available. Book an hour for something that takes 30 minutes, and it will take an hour. Default to shorter slots and see what happens.

⑤ The meeting with no record Decisions are made, but nobody writes them down. Next week, the same question comes up again. Another meeting gets scheduled to re-litigate something already resolved. The cycle continues indefinitely.

The Cost of Your Meetings Is Calculable

If you're curious what your meetings are actually costing, you can find out in about thirty seconds. Enter the number of attendees, their average hourly rate, and the meeting length — and get a real number.

→ Calculate your meeting cost at timefair.net

Once you see the number, the question "is this meeting worth holding?" starts to feel a lot more concrete.

What Changes When the Cost Is Visible

Organizations that track meeting costs tend to make different decisions:

• Fewer attendees: Only the people who genuinely need to be there
• Shorter blocks: 25-minute meetings instead of 30, 50 instead of 60
• Async first: If it can be a document or a Slack thread, it shouldn't be a meeting

None of this requires a radical culture change. It just requires making the cost visible — and letting that inform decisions.

Wrapping Up

"Wasteful meetings" isn't just a feeling. It's a number. For many teams, a handful of unnecessary recurring meetings adds up to hundreds of thousands of yen per year — often without anyone noticing.

Start by calculating what your meetings cost. Then decide what to do about it.

→ Meeting Cost Calculator — free, no signup required

For the full data behind meeting costs, see: The True Cost of Unproductive Meetings: 2026 Statistics