Senior Project Manager and Head of PMO Valeria Listratova created a tool with the help of Claude that helps calculate the real cost of work meetings. The idea is simple: an hour of meeting on the calendar is not necessarily one hour of work.
Senior Project Manager and Head of PMO Valeria Listratova created a tool with the help of Claude that helps calculate the real cost of work meetings. The idea is simple: an hour of meeting on the calendar is not necessarily one hour of work.
According to her, she made the tool during a small experiment with Claude: «I had an hour of time, a fun idea, and some free tokens in Claude.»
The tool allows you to visually translate the duration of a meeting and the number of participants into costs for the company. This way, it becomes clear how much working time the team actually spends on one call.
«Because calling 8 people per hour is not „just an hour.“ It’s already 8 hours of work that the business has paid for,» explained Fractional HRD/COO Yulia Zolotarenko, a user of the service.
The problem, in her opinion, begins when a meeting does not have a clear purpose, unnecessary people are invited to it, and some of the participants are present «just in case.»
«When there’s no agenda, half of the people sit „just in case,“ and in the last 20 minutes everyone just wants to eat, oh my,» HRD noted.
She suggests a simpler approach: fewer participants, a clear understanding of why they gathered, a specific decision — and the meeting ends.
Previously, Listratova also formulated several rules for more effective calls: do not invite unnecessary participants, come with an agenda, return the conversation to the original goal if it deviates, and respect timeboxes.
