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The Meeting That Could Have Been an Email
Meetings are often a necessary evil that comes with working with other people. There is information to be communicated, hands to shake and whiteboards and powerpoints to be stared at blankly. Anyone who has attended more than a handful of meetings in their lifetime will have inevitably encountered at least one meeting that could have been an email. The average employee spends 6 hours a week in meetings with executives spending a staggering 23 hours according to a report published by the MIT Sloan Management Review.
The Harvard Business Review did a poll of senior managers and found that 71% said that meetings were “unproductive and inefficient”. If you take that into account with the average of 23 hours spent in meetings, you get a wasted time allotment of over 16 hours a week. That’s a total of two full-time shifts. As a project manager, I value my time quite highly and find that I never quite have enough of it to accomplish everything. While I spend considerably less than 23 hours/week sitting in scheduled meetings, there are often informal meetings that require my attendance and input.
A quick google search on meetings reveals a combination of satirical comics and recommendations for how to increase the efficiency of meetings. As a society, we love to poke fun at our obsession with meetings while simultaneously viewing them as an essential part…
