Meetings are killing us

Time is an organization’s scarcest – and most often squandered – resource. To demonstrate how poorly most organizations manage this precious commodity, we used data-mining tools to analyze the Outlook schedules of everyone in a large company. What follows is real data from that company and how its weekly excom meeting rippled throughout the organization in a profoundly disturbing way.

1 weekly excom meeting accounts for 7,000 hours a year. At the excom meeting senior-level staff provide updates on all phases of the business. It uses 7,000 person hours of executives’ times annually. To prepare for this meeting, individual excom members need to meet with unit chiefs….people [at the company] spent 300,000 hours a year just supporting the weekly executive committee meeting.

From 99U.