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What your meeting actually costs.

Most calculators stop at salary × hours. That's the tip. The real bill includes the 23-minute recovery tail, the dead zone before the meeting starts, and prep time across every attendee. Drag the inputs — watch the gap.

23 min · Avg refocus time after a context switch
2,080 hr · Working hours per year
0 · Login required
1 Surface cost
$0 / meeting
What you'd see on a typical meeting cost calculator. Salary × hours, nothing more.
2 Loaded cost
$0 / meeting
Including benefits, taxes, and equipment overhead.
3 True cost
$0 / meeting
$0 / year at this cadence
Including the recovery tail, anticipatory dead zone, and prep time. This is what your meeting actually costs.

Your meeting didn't cost 30 minutes.

Time isn't fungible. A meeting in the middle of a focus window splits it into two shallow blocks — neither long enough for hard problems.

Without meeting
240 min
of focus
1 deep-work block
→
With 30-min meeting at 10:30
90m
MEETING
120m
2 shallow blocks · neither long enough for hard problems

Your meeting didn't cost 30 minutes. It cost your morning.

Your meetings cost the equivalent of

Why your meeting really costs more

01

Context switching

Gloria Mark's lab at UC Irvine clocked the average refocus cost at ~23 minutes after an interruption. A 30-minute meeting drags ~138 person-minutes of recovery into the rest of the day at six attendees.

— Gloria Mark, UC Irvine
02

Fragmentation

Two 90-minute blocks aren't worth one 180-minute block. Hard problems need uninterrupted runway. A meeting in the middle of a focus window doesn't cost its duration — it costs the focus block it bisects.

— Cal Newport, Deep Work
03

Pre-meeting drag

The 15 minutes before a meeting are dead. People stop starting things they can't finish, refresh their inbox, and watch the clock. The meeting begins long before the calendar says it does.

— Anticipatory effect, HBR

Run the ticker in your next meeting.

A real-time counter, paused or stopped on demand. Big enough to project. Screenshot-friendly when it ends.

FAQ

Methodology

hourly_rate          = (salary × (1 + overhead_pct)) / 2080
direct_cost          = attendees × hourly_rate × (duration_min / 60)
context_switch_cost  = attendees × hourly_rate × ((recovery + dead_zone) / 60)
prep_cost            = attendees × hourly_rate × (prep_min / 60)

per_meeting_true_cost = direct_cost + context_switch_cost + prep_cost
if quality_penalty:    per_meeting_true_cost = per_meeting_true_cost / 0.5

occurrences_per_year  = { Daily: 250, Weekly: 52, Bi-weekly: 26,
                          Monthly: 12, One-time: 1 }
annual_cost           = per_meeting_true_cost × occurrences_per_year
  1. Mark, G. — The Cost of Interrupted Work, UC Irvine. ~23 min avg refocus time.
  2. Osmani, A. — It takes 23 mins to recover after an interruption, 2025.
  3. Code by Tom — The cost of synchronous meetings, 2025.
  4. BLS — Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. Loaded cost overhead 25–35%.
  5. Newport, C. — Deep Work. Fragmentation and shallow blocks.
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Last updated April 2026 · v1.0