The cost of not transcribing meetings

Meetings didn't always eat the week. Harvard Business Review put the long arc plainly: executives now spend close to 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under 10 hours in the 1960s. The load more than doubled while nobody was watching the clock.

Then remote work poured fuel on it. Microsoft's Work Trend Index measured the shift in its own telemetry: for the average Microsoft Teams user, weekly time in meetings rose 252% and the number of weekly meetings rose 153% between February 2020 and early 2022. That's a specific population in a specific window – Teams users through the pandemic – but the direction was the same everywhere. The calendar filled, and it kept filling.

The point of the history is that no single decision put you in this many meetings. It accreted. Which means the cost accreted too, one recurring invite at a time.

The most-cited modern number comes from a 2022 study by Steven Rogelberg, written up for Otter.ai: the average employee sits in 17.7 meetings a week, about 18 hours, and judges roughly 6 of those hours unproductive. Around 30% of the meetings – nearly a third – are rated unnecessary by the people attending them.

Doodle's State of Meetings report, drawn from 6,026 professionals and 19 million analyzed meetings, landed even harsher: about two-thirds of meetings were seen as unnecessary, and professionals lost roughly 2 hours a week to pointless ones. That's about 13 wasted days a year per person, and on Doodle's math, some 24 billion hours a year across the markets it surveyed.

Notice what these two studies agree on despite different methods: a large share of meeting time is spent by people who, asked directly, say they didn't need to be there. That's the raw material the rest of this post is about.

Put a currency figure on the time and it stops being an annoyance and starts being a line item. The Rogelberg/Otter study estimated companies pay about $80,000 per professional employee per year for meeting time – and roughly $25,000 of that (about 31%) goes to meetings the employee considers unnecessary.

Scaled up, CBS News reported those unnecessary meetings cost a 5,000-person company more than $100 million a year, and about $2.5 million a year at a 100-person firm. Lucid Meetings, working from the wider US picture, estimates 36 to 56 million meetings happen every day in the US, and that total meeting time costs the economy on the order of $1.4 trillion a year.

None of that appears on an invoice, which is exactly why it's easy to ignore. Nobody sends you a receipt for the hour you spent half-listening to a meeting you'll never revisit. But the hour was real, and so was its price.

Last verified: 2026-07-13.

Wasted hours are the visible cost. The invisible one is what happens to the meetings that did matter, once they're over and nobody wrote anything down.

Human memory decays on a steep curve. In 2015, Murre and Dros published a careful replication of Ebbinghaus' classic forgetting-curve experiment in PLOS ONE. Measuring how much of newly learned material survives over time, they found relearning savings of about 57% after 20 minutes, about 42% after an hour, about 21% a day later, and only around 4% after a month.

That study measures lists of nonsense syllables learned by one dedicated subject, not board meetings – so read it as an analogy, not a stat about how much of a meeting you personally forget. But the shape is the honest part. Memory falls off fast in general, and by the next morning most of the fine detail of an unrecorded conversation – the exact number someone quoted, the caveat on the decision, who committed to what – is simply gone.

A meeting is a perishable thing. Left unrecorded, it starts spoiling the moment it ends.

Here's the number that closes the loop for anyone weighing whether to keep a transcript. In the same Rogelberg/Otter survey, 71% of employees said they could skip unnecessary meetings entirely if high-quality meeting notes were shared with them in a timely way.

That's the whole argument in one statistic. A written record isn't a consolation prize for missing a meeting – for most of the people copied on the invite, it's a full substitute for attending. If the record exists and arrives on time, they don't need to be in the room live. The transcript is what converts a two-hour meeting-for-twelve into a two-hour meeting-for-three plus a document everyone else reads in ten minutes.

So the cost of not transcribing isn't only the forgetting. It's every hour spent attending live because there was no record to read instead.

Stack the pieces and the tab comes due in three places. First, reconstruction: the second meeting held to figure out what the first one decided, because no one can find the answer. Second, drift: the action item that evaporates and the caveat that gets dropped, because the only copy was in someone's fading memory. Third, attendance: the people who sat through it live because a shareable record was never made.

The failures get worse the more voices are in the room. A one-on-one is easy to remember; a twelve-person planning call, with people talking over each other, is exactly where recall breaks down and a written record earns its keep. That's also where the record has to know who said what – the reason speaker diarization and transcribing multiple speakers matter for meetings specifically, not just clean audio.

And the cost isn't hypothetical for long recordings either. The longer and more crowded the meeting, the more there is to forget, and the more a transcript is worth. If you want a sense of how much audio a typical meeting actually is, we looked at how long the average recording runs.

None of the research above says "have fewer meetings," tempting as that is. It says something narrower and more actionable: keep a record of the ones you have. The forgetting curve, the 71% who'd skip if notes existed, the reconstruction meetings – every one of those costs is answered by a transcript you can search, share, and summarize.

That's the modest, honest place Pepys fits. You already record most calls; the missing step is turning that recording into a document that outlives your memory of it. A meeting summarizer gives you the decisions and action items at the top, the full transcript of a Zoom meeting underneath for when the exact wording matters, and you can hand the notes to everyone who didn't need to attend live. Pay once for the minutes, keep the file, transcribe when you actually have something to record.

The meetings will keep happening – the history in this post makes that fairly clear. What's optional is whether anything survives them. Not transcribing is the choice to let each one spoil on schedule.