Spend Less Time in Meetings This Summer
Beautiful Black woman wearing a pink swimsuit, blazer and sunglasses attends a frustrating meeting on her laptop.
By Lisa Bodell for Forbes
With the average employee spending 31 monthly hours in unproductive meetings, it’s also where you’re poised to spend 100 painful hours in Summer 2023. Given that just a handful of meetings you attend are actually productive — the rest are why you don’t have enough time for work that truly matters — make it a priority to conduct a meeting audit this June.
Open your calendar or schedule, and review your recurring meetings: daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Make a list of those which are a productive use of your time and set those aside. Now, create another list with every meeting that’s a waste of your time. Once you’ve captured those, use the approaches below for opportunities to eliminate, shorten or otherwise improve your meetings.
· Eliminate meetings. Taking an aggressive stance, software company TechSmith Corp. experimented with no meetings for a month — relying solely on asynchronous communication — and tracked a 15% increase in productivity.
How many of the time-wasting meetings you attend bring zero value to the business? If you’re in a position to cancel meetings that have clearly outlived their usefulness, delete those now. If you need permission, consider requesting a one-month or summer pause on the biggest time-wasters.