A 2-minute audit that could give you back a morning a week

Begin by writing down the five recurring meetings that consume the largest share of your week in Las Vegas. Chances are that one of them lost its usefulness a while back, possibly months ago. In Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women spread over 15 countries, 36% said their stress had risen compared with the previous year. You may not be able to reshape your industry this week, but you can reshape your calendar in about two minutes, and the meetings you keep attending only out of habit are the easiest place to begin.

An outdated meeting is nothing to feel bad about. It is an invitation someone created for a purpose that has since faded, and calendars never clear their own clutter. It's worth a closer look. Put each of your five through the ten statements that follow, then count the yes responses for every meeting separately.

The questionnaire

1. Look back: would you be able to say what the most recent session of this meeting settled?

2. Its update is short enough to live in a two-paragraph email, and in some cases it already arrives that way.

3. Over eight attendees show up, but under three of them ever take the floor.

4. It always runs to the end of its slot, regardless of what is on the agenda.

5. During it you tend to drift off to other tasks, and nobody appears bothered.

6. No one owns the agenda; it is the same invite from two years ago, still forwarding itself along.

7. Were it dropped this week across Southern Nevada, few would wonder about the reason.

8. You attend because of what might get said without you, not because of what you contribute.

9. The true choice gets made afterward in a more intimate discussion.

Step ten. It takes up your most alert hours of the day.

Zero to three yes answers: justifying its spot

This is a meeting that produces genuine value. It may still run too long. Request the agenda a full day ahead, and propose trimming the slot to half an hour. Work expands to occupy whatever time has been reserved for it, and reclaiming fifteen minutes is something nobody complains about.

Four to six: ready for a cut

Underneath all the filler sits a clear reason for the meeting to exist. Send the owner one sentence: "Could we try this every other week and see what breaks?" Most owners agree, because they are tired of it too. Should a month pass without anything going wrong, that settles it for you and for the rest of the group.

Seven to ten: defunct, but still on your calendar

Nobody else is going to scrap this one on your behalf. If you are the organizer, drop the meeting and replace it with the two-paragraph email. If you aren't, turn down the next three occurrences by replying, "I'll catch up on the notes. Summon me only when a call truly needs my say-so," then watch how things play out in Paradise or Enterprise. Usually, very little changes, and a quiet calendar is the best outcome you could ask for.

Where the morning should go

Trimming gatherings just to trim them defeats the purpose. It is putting your hours where decisions actually get made and pulling them out of rooms where none do. Winning back one morning every week amounts to a considerable block of hours. It could be spent on a strategy document, a candid check on your own role, or coffee with the one person who could change your next move, whether that is through a local networking group, a Henderson chamber event or a conversation at a Las Vegas women's leadership conference. Not one of those will ever show up as a formal invitation.

Let us know which of your five you eliminated, and whether anyone in Clark County noticed.