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

Start by listing the five recurring meetings that eat up the most of your week. For months, at least one of them has gone nowhere. Across 15 countries, Deloitte surveyed 7,500 women in 2025, and 36% of them reported higher stress levels than the previous year, including many here in Indianapolis. Nobody can rearrange Indianapolis's job market or the wider economy by Friday, but a calendar can be fixed in two minutes, and the meetings you keep attending from pure habit are the simplest place to begin.

When a gathering no longer serves a purpose, that drift is rarely anyone's fault in particular. Someone scheduled it for a reason that has since disappeared, and invitations never lapse on their own. Somebody needs to examine it. Put each of your five through the ten statements below and tally the yeses for each one.

The review

1. Think back: could you state what the last session in this series actually decided?

2. The information it shares could fit in a two-paragraph email, and in some cases it already does.

3. More than eight people join, yet fewer than three of them talk.

4. It always runs right up to the end of its time slot, regardless of the agenda.

5. While it drags on, you can squeeze in other tasks, and nobody appears bothered.

6. The agenda belongs to no one, having been copied forward from an invitation sent two years ago and left to keep circulating unchecked.

7. Were it to vanish this week, no one would think to wonder what happened to it.

8. You show up because of what might be said in your absence, not because of what you bring.

9. Decisions tend to get finalized afterward, in a quieter exchange among a handful of people.

Item ten It takes over the sharpest stretch of your workday in Indianapolis.

Zero to three yeses: earning its place

This meeting is doing real work for Central Indiana teams. It may still run long. Request the agenda a day early and propose cutting it down to half an hour. Meetings stretch to fill whatever time is booked for them, and nobody has ever objected to getting fifteen minutes back.

Four to six: time for a trim

Beneath the filler, the session does have a clear reason to exist. Send the owner a single line: "Could we try this every other week and see what breaks?" Most owners agree, since they are probably just as worn out by it as you are. If nothing goes wrong after a month, you have your answer, and so does everyone else.

Seven to ten: lifeless yet still on the calendar

Expect no one to step in and cancel it for you. Should you be the one running it, call it off and send a brief two-paragraph note in its place. Should you not be running it, turn down the next three by replying, "I'll catch up on the notes. Bring me in only if a decision requires my input." Then watch what unfolds. Usually nothing happens at all, and for a calendar, a blank block is the finest result it can deliver.

The case for early hours

Cutting meetings is not the goal in its own right. The aim is to redirect your time toward the rooms where choices are truly made and away from the ones where nothing gets settled. Reclaiming a single morning each week adds up to real, substantial time. It can go toward a strategy document, an honest look at your own role, or coffee with the one contact who could shape your next move. None of those will ever be sent out as a calendar invite.

Tell us which of your five you cancelled, and whether anyone in Indy noticed.