8 steps to making meetings more efficient and effective

We spend a lot of time in meetings.

U.S. workers hold a whopping 11 million meetings per day. That’s 55 million meetings per week and 220 million meetings per year, and most are utterly useless. Unproductive meetings waste time and money—more than $37 billion per year.

Fortunately, you can use eight science-backed strategies to conduct more-productive meetings:

1. Set meetings for 15 minutes or less.

The average meeting lasts 31 to 60 minutes. That’s way too long for our finnicky attention spans.

TED Talks do not exceed the 18-minute mark, because, as TED curator Chris Anderson explains, that “is long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention.”

Furthermore, consuming too much information at once drains your brain—even if you’re just listening to someone speak. We also tend to retain more information when we receive it in a tidier timeframe.

So, for the sake of productivity—and sanity—ditch the two-hour meeting.

2. Invite fewer people.