The meetings that stop

Every year, around the last week of June, the calendar for the week ahead develops holes that nobody made on purpose.

The Monday trading call is off because the person who runs it is away. The Wednesday creative review has moved twice and then stopped moving. The monthly agency review is "picking up in September" in an email nobody replied to. The schools are breaking up around now, and the people who own the meetings go with them.

The business does not stop. The orders come in, the campaigns run, the numbers get read by whoever is reading them. A set of meetings has vanished from the week, and nothing that was supposed to happen in them has failed to happen.

Look at which ones survive. The one where a number is signed off. The one where money is released. The one with a customer on the call. Anything with a decision in it finds a stand-in, a shorter slot, a WhatsApp message with the same outcome. The rest, the updates, the alignments, the check-ins, the meetings held because they were held last year, lose their host and quietly stop.

That is the sunk thing. A recurring meeting is never re-decided. It was decided once, by someone who may have left, and it has been paid for every week since in the one currency that never reaches a P&L, which is a room full of people's hours.

Summer runs a free audit of the calendar. It takes away the hosts and shows the business which meetings it needed.

Every September the calendar refills, and the meetings that stopped come back with the people who ran them, as though they had been missed.

The ones that do not come back on their own were never needed. The only time that is visible is now, with the hosts away and the holes still in the week.