18 hours a week in meetings — for a 6-person engineering team

I have counted it. Between standups, sprint planning, refinement, retrospectives, design reviews, cross-team syncs and one-to-ones, my team spends 18 hours a week in meetings. We are a 6-person team. That is three full engineering days lost before anyone writes a line of code. Delivery is slipping and the answer I keep getting is that we need more standups to track progress.

Background

Regulated financial services. Lots of stakeholders who feel entitled to a seat at every table. Some meetings are compliance-driven but not all.

Already tried

Cancelled two meetings that came straight back. Tried async standups via Slack — lasted two weeks before the PM said we had lost visibility.