95,000 hours?

Taking on a new position at one point in my career, my industrious administrative assistant scheduled my first week in the office before I even arrived. The schedule? 30-minute meetings between the hour-long meetings every day for a total of 47 meetings in week one. Between 8 and 5 that first Monday through Friday, I had four open hours. Sound like your schedule?

Like that assistant, we often think that if we really want to be productive, we should schedule every minute. And most of those minutes should be in meetings. Ouch.

Dave Barry once said:

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.”

Amen.

Let’s get some facts on the table:

• America Spends over $37B per year in meetings

• 25M meetings per day

• 15% of an organization’s time (% has increased every year since 2008) is lost to meetings

• 35% of Middle Management time is lost to meetings

• 50% of Upper Management time is lost to meetings

• 67% of meetings are judged to be failures
  

Even better:

• 91% of meeting participants confess to daydreaming

• 73% of meeting participants confess to doing other work

• 47% of meeting participants confess to complaining (clearly 53% are lying)

• 45% of meeting participants confess to feeling overwhelmed

• 39% of meeting participants confess to SLEEPING!

If you truly want an eye-opener, use this calculator to see how much money a single meeting costs your organization.

Folks, WE HAVE TO STOP MEETING LIKE THIS!

When finally getting my head around this, I resolved to not attend meetings unless I was presenting information or expected to participate in the decision-making. I then removed any invitees to meetings I called that were not presenting information or decision-making. Then I basked in the luxurious white spaces on my calendar.

Simple question: Are you giving your best or are you giving your most? They are mutually exclusive.

Check out this WSJ article on one company saving 95,000 hours for their company. Imagine what they will do with that.

Have a great week.