The meeting nobody scheduled
There is a meeting on your calendar right now that no living person decided to keep. It started for a reason. Someone, two years ago, faced a real problem — a launch was wobbling, a team was out of sync, a client needed a weekly touchpoint — and a recurring invite was the sensible fix. The launch shipped. The teams merged. The client churned. And the meeting kept appearing every Thursday at ten, faithful as a tide, long after the ocean had moved on.
Nobody is to blame. That is precisely the problem. No one chose to keep it, because keeping it required no choice at all. The invite renews itself. To end it, somebody would have to actively stand up and say this is over — and almost nobody does. The result is a calendar slowly silting up with meetings that have outlived their reason, each one defended by a quiet, very human logic: we've always done this.
That logic has a name in behavioral science, and understanding it is the first step to clearing your week of the meetings that no longer earn their place.
What the sunk cost fallacy actually is
The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to keep investing in something because of what you've already put in, rather than what you'll get out of it going forward. The classic illustration is the unfinished meal you keep eating because you paid for it, or the movie you sit through because you bought the ticket — even though the money is gone either way and the only thing your suffering buys is more suffering.
Economists are blunt about it: a sunk cost is irrelevant to a rational forward-looking decision. The only question that matters is whether the next hour of investment will return more than it costs. The past spending should weigh nothing. But it weighs a great deal, because humans are loss-averse — we feel the pain of waste far more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. Abandoning the meeting feels like admitting that all those past Thursdays were wasted. So we keep attending, partly to retroactively justify the attendance we've already logged.
Applied to a calendar, the fallacy is quiet but relentless. A weekly hour-long meeting with six people costs roughly six hours of attention every single week. Over a year that's a few hundred hours — a meaningful fraction of a full-time role — spent partly on momentum. We don't audit it, because auditing would force us to confront the accumulated waste, and the mind would rather keep paying than count the cost.
Why the default does the deciding
Sunk cost has an accomplice: status quo bias, our well-documented preference for leaving things as they are. In study after study, people stick with whatever option is presented as the default, even when switching is trivial and clearly better. The default carries an implicit endorsement — someone must have set it up this way for a reason — and changing it requires both effort and the willingness to own the outcome.
A recurring meeting is the status quo wearing its most effective disguise. Its defining feature is that it requires no renewal. A one-off meeting must be justified every time it's scheduled; a recurring meeting is justified once, at birth, and then never again. The burden of proof inverts. Instead of make the case to hold this meeting, the question silently becomes make the case to cancel it — and that case is awkward to make. Cancelling implies the meeting was a mistake. It risks looking like you don't value the people in it. It demands that one person spend social capital to save everyone else's time, a textbook case where the cost is personal and the benefit is diffuse.
So the meeting survives not because anyone believes in it, but because the architecture of the calendar is rigged toward continuation. Inertia isn't a flaw in your discipline. It's the system working exactly as designed.
The tells of a meeting on life support
Dead meetings have symptoms, if you know to look. The agenda has quietly disappeared, replaced by a round-robin of status updates that could have been three sentences in a shared doc. Attendance has drifted — the same two people carry it while others multitask with their cameras off. The first ten minutes are spent reconstructing what was decided last time, because nothing decided last time turned out to matter. And when someone misses it, nothing breaks. That last one is the clearest signal of all: if a meeting can be skipped with no consequence, it is no longer load-bearing.
There's a useful diagnostic question that strips away the sunk cost entirely. Don't ask should we cancel this meeting? — that frames cancellation as a loss and invites loss aversion to do its work. Instead ask: if this meeting did not exist, knowing everything we know now, would we create it today? This is the reversal test, and it quietly deletes the past from the equation. You're no longer protecting an investment; you're making a fresh decision on the merits. A surprising number of standing meetings cannot survive that question, and the fact that they can't is the answer.
How to retire a meeting without the guilt
The cure follows directly from the disease. If the problem is that recurrence requires no renewal, then the fix is to force renewal.
Give every recurring meeting an expiry date. Set the series to end in a quarter rather than running indefinitely. When it lapses, someone has to actively re-create it — which means someone has to actively decide it's still worth it. You've flipped the default. Now the meeting must earn its continuation instead of inheriting it.
Run a periodic calendar audit. Once a quarter, look at every standing meeting and apply the reversal test to each. The ones that wouldn't be re-created today are candidates for the chopping block. Doing this as a deliberate ritual matters, because it gives the act of cancelling a legitimate occasion — you're not singling out one meeting as a failure, you're maintaining the whole system.
Separate the goal from the meeting. Most meetings exist to serve a goal — alignment, unblocking, a decision — and we confuse the ritual with the result. Name the underlying need out loud. Often it turns out the need is real but the hour-long synchronous format is the wrong instrument; a short written update or an as-needed huddle serves it better. Killing the meeting doesn't mean abandoning the goal. It means finally asking what the goal actually requires.
Make the past explicitly irrelevant. When the conversation about cancelling does happen, say the quiet part plainly: the hours already spent are gone and unrecoverable regardless of what we decide now; the only question is what the next quarter of Thursdays is worth. Naming the sunk cost is often enough to drain its grip, because the fallacy thrives in the unexamined background and withers under direct attention.
None of this requires confrontation or blame. It requires one structural change — treating continuation as a decision rather than a default — and a recurring moment to make that decision honestly.
The calendar as a record of old decisions
A crowded calendar is rarely a sign of a busy present. More often it's an archaeological record of past emergencies that were solved long ago, each one fossilized into a recurring slot that nobody had the occasion to remove. You are, in a real sense, attending the meetings of people who no longer work the way you do — including a younger version of yourself who scheduled in good faith and then moved on.
Clearing them is not about doing less. It's about ensuring the time you spend together is spent on what's true now, not on what was urgent then.
This is the discipline MeetingMortem is built to support: a regular, structured post-mortem on your meetings that asks the reversal-test question for you and surfaces the standing meetings that have quietly stopped earning their hour. It makes cancellation a routine maintenance task instead of an awkward act of courage — so the meetings that survive are the ones a clear-eyed team would choose to create again today. If your calendar has started to feel like a museum, you can start the audit at https://meetingmortem.lumenlabs.works.