Every statistic below is a published figure from a named study — Atlassian, Doodle, Microsoft, Harvard Business Review, and Bain & Company — with the source linked. Feel free to cite this page; cite the originals too.
$37B
Unnecessary meetings cost U.S. businesses an estimated $37 billion per year in salary costs alone.
Source: Atlassian — "You Waste a Lot of Time at Work"$399B
Poorly organized meetings were projected to cost the U.S. economy $399 billion in 2019 (a further $58B in the U.K.).
Source: Doodle — State of Meetings Report 2019300,000 hours
At one large company analyzed by Bain & Company, employees spent the equivalent of 300,000 hours a year supporting a single weekly executive committee meeting.
Source: Bain & Company / Harvard Business Review, 201462
The average employee attends around 62 meetings per month — roughly 31 hours of meeting time.
Source: Atlassian — "You Waste a Lot of Time at Work"+252%
Weekly time spent in Microsoft Teams meetings per person rose 252% between February 2020 and 2022 — the pandemic-era meeting surge never went back down.
Source: Microsoft — Work Trend Index, 202223 hours
Executives can spend up to 23 hours per week in meetings — up from under 10 hours a week in the 1960s.
Source: Harvard Business Review — "Stop the Meeting Madness" (2017)13 days
Professionals spend around two hours a week in pointless meetings — 13 working days a year.
Source: Doodle — State of Meetings Report 201971%
Of senior managers surveyed said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
Source: Harvard Business Review — "Stop the Meeting Madness" (2017)65%
Said meetings keep them from completing their own work; 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.
Source: Harvard Business Review — "Stop the Meeting Madness" (2017)~50%
About half of the meetings employees attend are considered a waste of time by at least someone in the room.
Source: Atlassian — "You Waste a Lot of Time at Work"We won't over-claim. But three patterns in the research point the same direction:
The cost scales with attendance, not value
Bain’s 300,000-hour finding is the extreme case of a general rule: every attendee multiplies the cost of a meeting while adding nothing to the information itself. Status is broadcast information — reading it scales to any audience at near-zero marginal cost, sitting in a meeting does not.
The growth is recent, not inevitable
Microsoft’s +252% figure shows the meeting load is a recent organizational choice, not a law of nature. Practices that reversed it — written updates, fewer attendees, shorter defaults — are the ones teams kept after 2020. Nothing in the data says the status meeting has to be a meeting.
The information already exists in writing
Doodle’s 13-days-a-year figure measures time spent re-stating things verbally that were already said in email. When the source material is written, the update can be assembled from it — which is exactly what an async status update, or a tool like BrainFlow, does with the threads it’s CC’d on.
Last updated September 2026. Every figure on this page comes from a third-party study linked beneath it — Atlassian (“You Waste a Lot of Time at Work” infographic), Doodle (State of Meetings Report 2019, based on 6,500+ professionals and 19 million meetings), Microsoft (Work Trend Index, 2022, based on aggregated Microsoft 365 telemetry), Perlow, Hadley & Eun (Harvard Business Review, 2017, survey of 182 senior managers), and Bain & Company / HBR (2014, time-budget analysis of large corporations).
These studies use their own methodologies, populations, and definitions — costs are estimated from survey responses and calendar data, and figures from different sources are not directly comparable. Dollar figures are not adjusted for inflation from their publication years. We present them as published and link the originals so you can judge them yourself.
CC BrainFlow on the threads where work happens. Status questions get sourced answers by email or chat — without putting eight salaries in a room for an hour.
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