Almost every company has too many meetings, and it’s getting worse. According to an article from MIT’s Sloan Management Review, the average executive spends 23 hours a week in meetings, 10 full hours more than fifty years ago.
Since the average workweek is 47 hours, you could be spending approximately half of your time each week in meetings, Inc. reports. If your career is 45 years, from start to retirement, then you’d be spending 22 years in meetings.
Some of those meetings are productive but a lot of time in meetings is wasted in irrelevant conversations, boring presentations, and meandering chit-chat.
Here are three things you can do today to recapture that lost time:
1. No more PowerPoint: Harvard research reveals that displaying words while you talk actually reduces retention and comprehension.
2. No meeting longer than 30 minutes: The longer a meeting lasts, the more likely it is to become a waste of time. Every meeting should have an agenda and it should be possible to achieve that agenda in less than a half-hour.
3. If there’s no value added, leave immediately: If you cannot contribute to a meeting and the information isn’t valuable to you, don’t go. It is not rude to do this, simply explain that its not the best use of your time as a member of the team. Read the full story from Inc.
