Sure, and you can look at a list of recurring meetings and people can cancel them. Or you cancel all of them and see which ones get recreated. One way is probably more effective.
So whether it's meetings or money, my point stands: If the nuclear option of cancelling everything is necessary, then things are being poorly managed to begin with, and after pushing that nuclear button you need to take a big step back and assess just how you screwed things up so bad that you had to drop a nuke on your enterprise to fix it.
I'm not speaking from a theoretical arm-chair stance on this either. I've been somewhere that took the nuclear approach in various policies. One expense-driven decision was to fire every single worker of a certain type because they thought the classification was being abused. It probably was, in maybe 15% of the cases. For the responsibilities being performed by the other 85%, it was a massive disaster. Essential things went undone. Part of my own job involved analysis of customer trends, and the resulting loss of revenue. Millions of dollars were lost to the nuclear option, not to mention countless hours of busy work justifying re-hires and jumping through hoops for them, all to save a fraction of the money & time represented by that 15%. Did the nuclear option work? I guess? Sort of? Was it worth it? Not in the case I'm speaking about. But even if it had been worth it, it still spoke to systemic issues that went above and beyond the particular problem solved by dropping a nuke on it.
No, a thousand times over no.
The existing meeting schedule is the carefully calibrated result of a thousand different constraints running into each other and finding a workable balance.
Why would you destroy that?
Best-case scenario, you add a ton of busy work for everyone to re-create the same thing, and everybody loses a quarter of a day trying to resolve who owns which meetings and is everyone back on them.
Worse-case, you inject utter chaos as only half of the needed people show up for key decisions and critical processes grind to a halt for a few weeks.
Sometimes I'm shocked at how cavalier some people can be about management.
I find this attitude especially prevalent in the tech startup end of things for a few reasons: Most startups start small enough that peer-to-peer relationships and a personal stake & passion all mean that having staff in a role solely dedicated to managerial work isn't necessary. As a result of this, when they get larger, they undervalue the need. As a result of that, as the need arises, it is poorly done, furthering the sentiment that such roles are wasteful of resources and time.
Outside of this "home grown" disdain for managers in tech, there's also the problem systemic in modern business stemming from the idea of "scientific management" that arose about 100 years ago and really gained traction in the 50's & 60's. Depending on your point of view, it's either fundamentally wrong (in part or whole), or it has simply been poorly implemented in nearly all cases. Regardless, it's what gave rise to the notion that "manager" was a job like any trade, and people could be trained up and deployed as interchangeable pieces in any business. (Which rather ignored the fact that even in trades, there are specialties). It created a few generations of managers that thought actual detailed knowledge of a business's operations wasn't necessary to being a good manager.
I think we're, mostly, past that. (as in past the tipping point moving away from it, not that it isn't still prevalent in some segments of business)
But the two phenomena are where I think the casual disdain comes from in the tech industry for non-engineering managers.
I don't disagree but I'd add that a lot of tech people are often (and often correctly) focused on some narrow aspect of a problem. At the same time, they're often not aware of or even outright dismissive of broader questions of company strategy, market fit, etc. So they think decisions that are made in a broader context than their particular project are clearly a pointy-hair-boss/MBA/etc. problem.
On the other hand, if you cancel everything, then the default will be off. Essential services will require you to go through the hoops again because they are essential.
Have you done this in a managerial capacity before? Is what you're saying borne out of experience?
I'm skeptical because while "just coach people" is a nice sentiment - it is extremely hand wavy and ineffective at solving the actual problem.
But if you want specifics: A good manager doesn't need to drop a nuke on the situation: They've paid enough attention to be continuously evaluating their operations and, in the case of meetings or any thing else, asking themselves and their employees, "what are we doing here? what is the value of this activity?" and pruning things as they go. So, again: Maybe the nuclear option is needed in some situations, but if so, it means things have been poorly handled to get there.
"Cancel all recurring meetings" shouldn't be passed around as some trite startup productivity "hack" like the cliche "have all meetings standing up", like something everyone should thoughtfully consider as an insight into modern business culture norms. It should be spoken of in whispers to organizations so mired in their own incompetence that, in recognizing a problem, they can't even think of a good solution except to drop a nuke on themselves.
When we've done this, everyone on the team was on-onboard and bought in. It's not like people walked in one day and all the meetings were gone - that would break trust.
I'm not saying don't take this sort of action. And certainly, if you have to, the way you went about it is probably sensible. I'm saying that well-run operations don't have to do it at all.
It can be very effective at solving the actual problem. If that actual problem is people not having a skill. Like good time management. Or judiciously using the time of colleagues.