Meetings: Officially a Waste of Time

One expert says every organization - including yours - is ruining productivity with meetings

Chances are if you're reading this at work, either you just got out of a meeting, you're about to head into a meeting, or you're actually in a meeting right now. Maybe it's a conference call to which you're devoting approximately 8 percent of your attention while you update your Facebook status to "...is in another stupid meeting!"

So next time your boss calls another pointless session of "facetime," send him or her this link to the New York Times piece by Reid Hastie, an organizational expert from the University of Chicago. His conclusion about meetings? "Every organization has too many," and they "make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels." (Which explains that glassy-eyed stare your coworkers get after 15 minutes in the boardroom.) Hastie doesn't advocate doing away with meetings altogether (bummer) but he does offer plenty of advice for making them count, because "you can't earn an extra hour to use on a busy day."

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