A 2-minute audit that could give you back a morning a week

Start with the five recurring meetings that eat the most hours in your week. Several of them have gone nowhere for the better part of a year. Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women across 15 countries found that 36% say their stress has climbed over the past year. You may not be able to change your industry this week, but you can change your calendar in two minutes, and the meetings you keep attending from habit are the simplest place to begin.

Finding a meeting that serves no purpose does not mean you have fallen short. Somebody set it up to solve a problem that no longer exists, and recurring invitations simply keep going out on their own, year after year, in Cincinnati offices and across Greater Cincinnati alike. Somebody needs to examine it. Put each of your five through the ten statements below and count the yes answers for each.

The test

1. Ask yourself what, if anything, the last session in Covington actually decided.

2. What it delivers could fit into a brief two-paragraph email, and in some cases a message like that is already being sent.

3. Over eight people sit in on it, yet barely three of them ever contribute.

4. No matter how light the agenda is, it stretches to fill every minute of its booking.

5. You work on other tasks during it and nobody seems to notice.

6. No one owns the agenda; it is the same invite from two years ago, still sending itself out.

7. Should this be scrapped this week, nobody would wonder about the reason.

8. You attend because of what might be decided without you, not because of what you contribute.

9. Whatever gets settled is usually hashed out afterward in a much smaller side discussion.

10. It is booked into the hours when your focus is at its peak.

Between zero and three yes answers: it has earned its place.

Across Southwest Ohio, this gathering is genuinely doing necessary work. It may still run long. Your next move is to request the agenda a day ahead and suggest cutting it to thirty minutes. Meetings stretch to fill the time booked for them, and nobody has ever objected to getting fifteen minutes back.

Four to six: ready for some pruning

The meeting has a purpose but plenty of padding. Write the organizer a single line: "Would it work to meet every other week and watch for any fallout?" Most organizers say yes, since the sessions wear them down just as much as they wear you down. When a month goes by without anything falling apart, both of you have the answer you needed.

Seven to ten: lifeless, yet still booked

You'll have to cancel this yourself, because no one else will do it for you. If the meeting is yours to run, end it and send the two-paragraph update instead. If you do not own it, decline the next three with "I'll catch up on the notes. Bring me in only when a choice truly calls for me, then observe the outcome. Most of the time, nothing happens, and that quiet is the finest outcome a calendar can produce.

Why the morning exists

Simply reducing meeting volume for its own sake misses what matters here. It is to put your hours where decisions actually get made and remove them from rooms where none do. A morning each week is a real amount of time. It can be spent on a strategy document, an honest look at your own role in the market, or coffee with the one person who could change your next job. Not one of those will show up as a calendar invitation.

Let us know which of your five you dropped, and whether anyone in Blue Ash or West Chester even noticed.