<aside> 📋 Frequency: Monthly | Time: 30 min | Trigger: End of first week each month

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Meetings are the largest single consumer of billable capacity in a solo practice, and the least audited. Without a monthly review of your meeting load, recurring calls that outlived their purpose stay on the calendar indefinitely, sessions drift longer than they should, and you lose hours per week to conversations that produce no documented decisions. This SOP runs once a month to catch that drift before it becomes the default.

Prerequisites

• Your calendar for the prior month visible — recurring meetings, client calls, internal blocks, with durations recorded
• Session notes or action item logs from client meetings over the prior month
• A rough estimate of billable vs. non-billable meeting hours for the past four weeks

Procedure

1. Open your calendar and list every recurring meeting currently on your schedule. For each one, note the client or purpose, duration, and cadence.
2. For each recurring meeting, apply a single test: if this meeting didn't exist, would the engagement suffer? If the answer is no — or requires more than 10 seconds to construct — flag the meeting for restructuring.
3. Review session notes from the prior month. Flag any meeting that ran more than 15 minutes over its scheduled slot. These are scope creep signals — they indicate the meeting lacks a defined endpoint or outcome.
4. For any upcoming client meeting that lacks a standing agenda, run the Meeting Agenda Builder skill with the client context, meeting type, and intended outcome as input. Review the output and send the agenda to the client at least 24 hours before the session.
5. Total your weekly meeting hours across all clients and purposes. If meetings account for more than a third of your working hours, commit to one concrete change before next month: shorten a recurring call, convert one meeting to an async update, or cancel a standing session that no longer produces decisions.

Expected Outcome

You'll have a current meeting inventory with total weekly hours calculated, structured agendas ready for any upcoming meetings that lacked them, and at least one concrete change to your recurring meeting schedule — a cancellation, a shortening, or a restructure to async.

<aside> ⚠️ Common mistakes:

— Auditing the calendar but not making any changes. Identifying that a recurring call could be shortened and then leaving it unchanged is not a completed SOP — it's a note to yourself that you'll ignore. Every audit produces at least one decision.

— Creating agenda templates but not sending them in advance. An agenda that exists but isn't shared before the meeting doesn't change behavior. Send it 24 hours out, or the session will run the same way it always has.

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