The Time Spent on Managing (Not Attending) Meetings is More Than 15%

This is the first post in the three-part article series about managing meetings effectively that are originally published on Avoma's blog.

Whether you like it or not, meetings are a significant time suck in your professional life. Irrespective of whether you have email, messaging, or other collaborative solutions at your workplace, you will still end up attending a lot of meetings in-person or online - and more often than not, they still feel like a waste of time.

Let’s put that perception aside and look at the data. Folks at?LucidMeetings?have done some detailed analysis.

Some eye-opening stats

Number of meetings

While there isn’t a standardized way to count this, here is an estimate based on some data and extrapolation. These statistics are staggering:

• In the US alone, approximately 55 million meetings happen every single day
• If you’re a manager, on average you’re probably meeting 12 times/week
• If you’re an individual contributor, on average you’re probably meeting 8 times/week

Effectiveness of meetings

Most people actually think meetings are useful and good, but of course, there is some room for improvement as well -

• 69% of people said meetings were good and productive
• 31% of people said they weren’t productive

Why do we do so many meetings?

Not all meetings are wasteful or unnecessary. In fact, if they’re done well, they’re very effective in:

• putting names to faces
• building relationships
• bringing alignment and clarity
• getting things done and making progress

Unfortunately, this is frequently not the case with the way meetings are run today. A lot of them may feel like a waste of time because they require a lot of work for preparation, collaboration, and documentation.

Let’s look into that in detail and understand what’s a typical lifecycle of a meeting looks like.

A typical meeting lifecycle

In general, there are really 3 phases of any meeting’s lifecycle:

• Before the meeting
• During the meeting
• After the meeting

And in each phase, there are typical tasks we do.

Before the meeting

• Planning an agenda
• Scheduling a meeting
• Researching attendees
• Preparing presentation or discussion material

During the meeting

• Preparing to join a meeting (dialing in to a conference bridge for online Vs planning a commute for in-person)
• Deciding action items, respective owners, and timelines
• Taking brief meeting notes

After the meeting

• Writing detailed meeting notes
• Sharing notes with attendees and colleagues who were not part of the meeting
• Entering information into some system of record for tracking purposes
• Completing your action items
• Following up on others’ action items

What’s the cost of managing a meeting?

Now let’s understand what’s the true cost of running or managing (not attending) a meeting.

Low-value tasks

If you look at the list of all the tasks, you can identify there are certain tasks like scheduling a meeting, dialing into a conferencing bridge, or planning for external meeting commute - all are low-value tasks that busy professionals should not be doing.

These low-value tasks take somewhere between 2 to 5 minutes each.

High-value tasks

At the same time, there are certain tasks like planning an agenda, preparing discussion materials, taking detailed meeting notes, etc., which are high-value tasks, which busy professionals must do, but they are doing it poorly because of multi-tasking or lack of time.

These high-value tasks typically take somewhere between 5 to 20 minutes per task to do.

Significant time suck!

If you do some quick math and sum it all up, you realize that you would be spending somewhere between 15-45 minutes managing activities around a single meeting (not actually attending)!

For the simplification, let’s average it out and assume -

On average, you’re spending 30 mins in managing a meeting.

And if you’re in a management role, then as per the research quoted above, you’re attending on average 12 meetings/week -

You’re spending 6 hours/week or 15% of your workweek time just managing activities around meetings (again, not attending meetings).

That’s a significant portion of your work week!

Obviously, I just highlighted a problem that exists in our day-to-day life, and you might be wondering, but what’s the solution to this problem?

In the next post of this series, I share how can we get back 15% of our time, that we didn’t know we were spending on just “managing” meetings, and not actually attending them!