Budget weekly meeting time.
A meeting consumes attendees multiplied by duration, not just duration. Fourteen meetings a week averaging 42 minutes is under ten hours of your own time, but at five attendees it is nearly fifty person-hours — more than a full-time role. Costing those person-hours is what makes the case for removing an attendee or shortening a standing slot, because the saving scales with the number of people in the room.
Meeting load and cost
Weekly hours = meetings x minutes / 60; person-hours = weekly hours x attendees; cost = person-hours x hourly cost
Beyond about 40 percent of the week, most people report insufficient uninterrupted time for the work the meetings are about. Above 60 percent, the calendar is effectively the job.
Reducing attendees, because cost scales linearly with them. Halving a five-person meeting to three saves 40 percent of its cost while removing nothing from the agenda.
It is one of the highest-leverage changes available. Moving defaults from 30 and 60 minutes to 25 and 50 both recovers time and creates gaps between meetings, and agendas reliably compress to fit.