Every meeting has a price tag. Most people just can't see it.
I spend a lot of time in meetings. Some of them are genuinely useful, but if I'm honest, probably 20% of them actually move anything forward. The frustrating part is you usually only know which ones mattered after the fact.
In the private sector I bill for my time, so the cost is always visible — to me, at least. But I've been spending more time in the third sector recently, and I keep noticing the same thing: rooms full of people where some are on decent salaries, some are on minimum wage, and some are volunteers giving their time for free. Nobody's tracking what that hour cost. Nobody's asking whether it was worth it.
So I built something.
You put in who's in the room and what they earn. The clock starts. The cost ticks up in real time, not as a gimmick, but as a genuine prompt: is what we're talking about worth what we're spending?
It's not about making people feel guilty for having meetings. It's about making the cost of a meeting as legible as any other line in a budget. If a charity is spending £400 of staff and volunteer time on a monthly catch-up that could be an email, that's £400 that didn't go to the people the charity exists to serve.
The tool is free. Try it here.