A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that analyzed metadata from the emails and meetings of 3 million people found that as a result of lockdowns, the number of meetings that the average person attends per day is up 13 percent.
The good news is the length of the average meeting is down 20 percent, meaning that on balance people are spending 12 percent less time in meetings per day.
A silver lining if ever I saw one.
Here is my philosophy on the appropriate length of a meeting.
The designated end time of a meeting is the demarcation of failure. If you reach the designated end of your meeting, you have failed to conduct your meeting in the most efficient way possible. We do not designate an end time to a meeting in order to determine the time on the clock when the meeting will conclude but to determine if we have succeeded or failed in honoring everyone’s exceedingly precious time.
In other words, the only successfully run meeting is the one that ends early.
