Are meetings a waste of time?

While it's easy to complain about the sheer amount of time we spend in meetings, I think it's worth remembering that there are plenty of pros to being in one.

For one thing, they're a great place to connect with coworkers and keep up on what everyone is doing. It can be really rewarding to understand how your project fits into the larger company goals, and how you personally fit into the projects of others.

In addition, meetings are often a good way to find out when you need to change your approach, or when someone doesn't understand something. If you're having trouble getting buy-in on an idea, or if something isn't working, it's better to hear about it sooner rather than later—otherwise, you might waste a lot more time down the road trying to figure out why something didn't work.

That said, I also believe that meetings can be like boomerangs: if you throw them at people just for the sake of throwing them, they'll probably come back and hit you in the head. Meetings are only useful if they have an agenda and purpose; otherwise, it's just a big old waste of time for everyone involved.

But you need to ensure that each meeting that you book has a productive end result. Here are some ways to achieve that.

1. Make sure you have an agenda. If you don't know what you're trying to accomplish during the meeting, how do you expect anyone else to know? Set out clear goals for each item on the agenda.

2. Only invite people who need to be there. If someone isn't going to contribute or isn't going to be impacted by the outcome of the meeting, don't invite them along. They'll just be frustrated (and maybe angry).

3. Have an end goal. Figure out what you want the end result of this conversation or this project.

4. Keep them short. Preferably 15 minutes or less, and no more than an hour. If you go over an hour, people start losing focus and getting distracted by their phones—plus it cuts into everybody's day, which is not cool.

So what do you guys think? Are meetings basically a waste of time? Or are they actually useful?