The Meeting Tax: How Coordination Costs Are Quietly Killing Your Throughput

The calendar as diagnostic tool

Open any senior leader’s calendar and you’ll find the same pattern: back-to-back meetings from 9 to 5, with actual work squeezed into evenings and weekends. Most organisations treat this as a cultural problem (“we need fewer meetings”) and respond with meeting-free days or calendar audits. These interventions rarely stick because they’re treating a symptom, not a cause.

The real question isn’t “why do we have so many meetings?” It’s “what structural conditions make this volume of coordination necessary?”

When you reframe the problem this way, the calendar becomes a diagnostic tool. Every recurring meeting is evidence of a dependency that hasn’t been resolved through better design. Every ad-hoc sync is a signal that information isn’t flowing where it needs to go. Every status update meeting is an admission that the work itself isn’t legible to the people who need to understand it.

Coordination costs scale non-linearly

Fred Brooks observed in 1975 that adding people to a late project makes it later. The underlying principle (that coordination costs scale non-linearly with team size) is well understood in theory but routinely ignored in practice.

A team of five has ten possible communication channels. A team of ten has forty-five. A team of twenty has one hundred and ninety. Most organisations respond to this explosion not by reducing dependencies but by adding coordination mechanisms: more meetings, more status reports, more alignment sessions.

This is the meeting tax. It’s the percentage of total available work hours consumed by the overhead of coordinating rather than doing. In our experience, most organisations are paying a meeting tax of between 40 and 60 percent for senior staff. Some exceed 70 percent.

The tax isn’t evenly distributed. It falls disproportionately on the people whose time is theoretically most valuable (senior leaders, architects, principal engineers), creating the paradox where the people best positioned to solve strategic problems have the least time to think about them.

Three sources of unnecessary coordination

Not all coordination is waste. Some meetings genuinely create value. The problem is distinguishing necessary coordination from the three common sources of unnecessary overhead.

Ambiguous ownership

When it’s unclear who owns a decision, coordination becomes the default mechanism for making progress. Teams call meetings not because they need input but because they need permission, or at least cover. The tell-tale sign is meetings where the primary output is scheduling another meeting with different people in the room.

The fix isn’t better meetings. It’s clearer ownership. Every decision that regularly requires cross-team coordination should have an explicit owner with the authority to decide. If you can’t name that person, you’ve found a structural gap.

Missing feedback loops

Teams coordinate excessively when they can’t see the impact of their work. If the only way to know whether your component works with another team’s component is to ask them, you’ll have a lot of integration meetings. If the only way to know whether your feature is being used is to ask the analytics team, you’ll have a lot of review meetings.

The fix is instrumenting the work so that information flows automatically. Continuous integration, feature flags with usage metrics, shared dashboards that update in real time: these aren’t just engineering practices. They’re coordination cost reducers.

Structural coupling

Sometimes teams meet constantly because their work is genuinely coupled, because they’re building components that can’t function independently. In this case, the meetings aren’t the problem. The architecture is. Conway’s Law tells us that system structure mirrors organisation structure. The corollary is that if your systems are tightly coupled, your teams will be too, and no amount of calendar management will change that.

The fix is investing in interfaces (APIs, contracts, well-defined boundaries) that allow teams to work independently. This is expensive upfront but pays compound returns in reduced coordination costs.

Measuring the tax

Most organisations don’t measure coordination costs because they’re diffuse and normalised. Here’s a simple approach we’ve used with clients.

First, categorise every recurring meeting into one of four types: decision-making (we need to choose something), information sharing (someone needs to know something), problem-solving (we need to figure something out), and status reporting (someone needs to see progress).

Then ask: for each meeting, could the same outcome be achieved asynchronously? If the answer is yes, you’ve found a candidate for elimination. In our experience, 30 to 50 percent of recurring meetings fall into this category, primarily information sharing and status reporting.

The remaining meetings are worth examining for structural causes. Decision-making meetings that recur on the same topic suggest ambiguous ownership. Problem-solving meetings that involve the same teams suggest structural coupling. Status reporting meetings that can’t be replaced asynchronously suggest missing feedback loops.

The compounding effect

Meeting tax doesn’t just consume time. It degrades the quality of the time that remains. Context switching between meetings fragments attention. The cognitive overhead of tracking multiple conversational threads reduces the depth of thinking applied to any single problem. And the emotional labour of being “on” in back-to-back interactions drains the energy needed for creative and strategic work.

This compounds. Teams that spend most of their time coordinating produce lower-quality work, which creates more problems, which require more coordination to resolve. Breaking this cycle requires treating coordination cost as a first-class metric (something you measure, track, and actively work to reduce) rather than an inevitable consequence of working at scale.

What to do about it

The organisations that manage coordination costs well share three characteristics.

First, they treat team boundaries as a design decision, not an org chart inheritance. Teams are structured around value streams with minimal cross-team dependencies, and those structures are revisited when the work changes.

Second, they invest in asynchronous communication infrastructure. Design documents, architecture decision records, recorded demos, shared dashboards: these aren’t overhead. They’re the mechanisms that make synchronous coordination unnecessary for the majority of information flow.

Third, they measure and review coordination costs explicitly. When a new recurring meeting is proposed, someone asks: “What structural problem is this meeting compensating for, and can we fix the structure instead?”

The meeting tax is real, it’s large, and it’s growing in most organisations. But it’s not inevitable. It’s a design choice, one that most organisations are making by default rather than by intent.