Recurring process is the interest you pay on artefacts you haven't built
Every recurring meeting on your engineering calendar is an interest payment.
A one-off meeting can be a decision. A recurring one can't, because a decision, once made, doesn't need making again next Tuesday. It's servicing something: a question the company keeps answering by hand, because nobody has built the thing that would answer it. A cost that repeats because a one-time cost was dodged is interest.
The artefact is the principal. An artefact, here, is anything built once that answers the question every time it's asked. A dashboard that shows what's actually deployed. A board of work in progress that's actually true. A file that holds a decision. A test that holds a promise. Artefacts are dear to build and close to free to run. Meetings are the reverse: thirty seconds to create, and a cost that repeats forever.
Take a 60-engineer company where each engineer spends four hours a week in standing rituals. Standups, status meetings, estimation, syncs, the design argument that's back for its third quarter. Four hours is on the low side. It's 11,000 engineer-hours a year. At a $172 fully loaded rate, that's about $1.9 million, spent mostly on restating facts that existed before the meeting started.
A meeting where hard-won judgment meets a hard decision is the work itself. A one-to-one is care, not coordination; keep every one of them. The rest of the calendar, the standing majority that moves facts from one head to another, exists because artefacts don't.
What Each Meeting Is Paying For
The daily standup is interest on a record of work in progress that nobody trusts. If the board reflected reality, the standup would be somebody reading it aloud, and most standups are exactly that. The weekly status meeting is interest on a state file nobody keeps. The estimation ceremony is interest on delivery history nobody consults. Your last two hundred tickets already know how long a task like this takes. The cross-team sync is interest on a decision trail. The same decisions get re-fought because they were never written down where the next argument could find them.
And the recurring design argument, back for its third quarter with the same two camps, is interest on the oldest missing artefact of all. Those fights recur because both sides are right, about different readers of the same fact, and a fight where both sides are right can't be won. It can only be out-built. The lockfile closed a decade of pin-versus-float by storing both answers: the reference for the reader who wants now, and the copy for the reader who wants then. Roughly $17,000 a year of argument, ended by a $700 afternoon.
My own weekly report to an exec team is a render of two committed state files. A linter refuses it when the words and the files disagree. It replaced a meeting, and nobody has asked for the meeting back. Amazon wrote the same rule into its meetings years ago. The six-page memo means the meeting starts by reading an artefact, instead of hearing one person remember it.
Why the Debt Compounds
The imbalance is pricing. A meeting is the cheapest thing in a company to create, and its cost lands on other people, next week, forever. An artefact's cost lands on you, now, and the benefit arrives quietly for years. A company under deadline pressure will choose the meeting every time, and a deadline is always on. That choice is borrowing, and borrowing always feels free at the point of sale.
Being seen makes it worse. Attendance is visible: a full calendar looks like the work. Building the artefact looks, from the outside, like nobody doing anything. So companies reward the interest and rarely budget the principal.
Each recurring meeting spawns a pre-meeting, follow-ups, and a thread. Each one trains the team that the record isn't where truth is, which makes every artefact less trusted, which makes more meetings necessary. Companies drift into fifteen standing meetings because nobody was ever asked to build the thing that would end one.
The Audit
So read your standing meetings the way a buyer reads a company's debts: as a creditors' list. For each entry, ask one question: what artefact would end this meeting.
First, the artefact names itself: a board that's true, a deploy dashboard, a written decision trail, a second store for the fact two camps keep fighting over. Build it and cancel the meeting, and you've repaid principal. A weekly hour with eight people is about $63,000 a year, and the artefact is usually an afternoon to a week. Second, the meeting survives the question. Keep it. Third, no artefact would help and no judgment is happening, and you've found a meeting that exists because someone needs it to. That one is politics, and it should be handled as politics, by whoever runs the team.
None of this asks your team to talk less. It asks the company to stop renting answers it could own. Audit the calendar, repay one debt a quarter, and the layer thins on its own. The companies that feel fast have fewer creditors.