The First Five Minutes Are a Taxi Meter

Get into a taxi and the meter starts before the car does. It runs while you sit at the light, while the driver hunts for the turn, while you finish a call at the curb. Nobody finds this confusing. The meter is not paying for distance. It is paying for time, and time passes whether or not anything is moving.

A meeting works the same way and almost nobody treats it that way. The calendar says ten o'clock. At ten o'clock two people are in the room. At three minutes past, someone is fighting with the screen share. At six minutes past, the last person arrives and apologizes, and at seven minutes past the actual meeting starts. Those seven minutes are not free because nothing happened in them. They are the taxi at the curb. Every person in the room is being paid for them.

Price it and it stops being a small annoyance. Ten people at a fully loaded average salary of $104,000 a year come to $50 an hour each on a standard 2,080 hour work year, so the room burns $500 an hour, a little over $8 a minute. Seven wasted minutes at the top of the hour is $58 of payroll spent watching a login screen. Do that twice a week for a year and you have handed about $6,000 to the waiting.

That figure is the polite version. It counts only the people sitting there. It does not count the ones who showed up on time, saw a room with nothing happening in it, and went back to their desks to start something they will have to drop in four minutes.

The video call has its own version and it is worse, because the waiting is silent. Six people sit looking at each other's names on a screen, not talking, because starting a conversation with half a room feels odd and nobody wants to be the one who has to stop it. In a physical room the wait at least buys a little goodwill and the occasional useful aside. On a call it buys nothing at all. The meter runs the same.

Late is a decision somebody made

Meetings do not start late by accident, and treating it as bad luck is why it never gets fixed. Usually one of three things happened.

The first is that the meeting before it ran to the wall. A 9:30 that ends at 10:00 cannot produce a 10:00 that starts at 10:00, because nobody teleports. Book back to back hours and you have decided in advance that one of them starts late.

The second is that being last costs nothing. If the meeting waits for you, arriving late is free, and free things get done more often. The people who arrive on time pay for the people who do not, which is a strange arrangement to keep running on purpose.

The third is the technology, and this one is genuinely easy. Nobody should be discovering at two minutes past that they cannot share their screen. That is a five minute check done once, not a five minute tax paid every week by ten people.

Start the meter when the calendar says

Here is the whole fix. It is not a policy document.

1. Schedule the meeting for fifty minutes instead of sixty. The ten minutes you give back are what lets the next one start on time.
2. Start at the stated minute with whoever is in the room. Do not recap for latecomers. The recap is the reward that keeps the habit alive.
3. Put the joining link and anything worth reading in the invite itself, so nobody needs four minutes to work out what this is.
4. Give the meeting one owner whose job is to open it. A meeting waiting on a person who has not arrived is a meeting with nobody in charge.

The uncomfortable part is step two, and it is uncomfortable exactly once. The first time a senior person walks in at four past and the room is already mid decision, the message lands harder than any reminder about punctuality. After that it mostly runs itself.

There is an objection worth taking seriously. Some of those early minutes are not waste. People catch up, somebody mentions a problem sideways, and a real thing surfaces that would never have made an agenda. That is worth money, and losing all of it is a bad trade. So buy it on purpose. Put five minutes of talk at the front and say that is what it is. A small talk slot you chose costs the same as seven minutes of nobody knowing whether the meeting has started, and only one of the two makes the room feel respected.

The end of the hour deserves the same arithmetic and almost never gets it. A meeting that runs eleven minutes over costs the same $8 a minute as the wait at the front, and it costs it at the worst moment, because everyone in the room is now late for the next thing and the next room is starting its own wait. One meeting running long is not one meeting running long. It is a fare being passed down the rank all afternoon. If your ten o'clock reliably ends at eleven past, your two o'clock is being paid for by a decision made four hours earlier.

None of this needs a rule about punctuality, and rules about punctuality mostly produce resentment anyway. What changes behavior is the thing that changes it in the taxi. You can see the number moving. Open the meter at dollarspersecond.com on the shared screen, set the headcount and the rate, and start it at the stated minute rather than when the talking begins. Let the room watch $8 a minute pile up while the screen share gets sorted out. Nobody will need to be told twice.