Opening your work calendar on a Monday morning often comes with a very real sense of dread. You stare and sigh at the colorful squares blocking off hours of your time throughout the day, and the awkward intervals in between the squares confirm that it’ll be a struggle to get any real work done. The most frustrating thing? Most of these meetings aren’t necessary.
More than being expensive, useless meetings are a quick way to stunt team productivity. Across industries, research shows that it takes 25 minutes to return your concentration back to an original task after a significant interruption. Meetings also increase the likelihood of people committing errors during a task, because they miss or repeat important components. And in one survey, 65% of workers said that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
