Reclaim your workweek: Cutting down on meeting overload [Video]

QUESTION: Dear Laurie, my company wastes so much time in unproductive meetings. We have about 4-6 hours of standard weekly meetings, and no one wants to tell the CEO that some are a waste of time. Do you know how to address this professionally?

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Laurie Thiel: There’s a book, “Meetings: Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts,” by Sharon Lippincott. It’s still in print because I bought it a few months ago. It’s loaded with fabulous tips about effective meeting management and goes so far as to address if you should have a meeting at all and suggests some alternatives.

If not yourself, someone in those meetings must speak up. Maybe the CEO feels the same way, but has hesitated to change or doesn’t know what to do. No one has time to waste in unproductive meetings.

Another suggestion is to hold a companywide survey of meetings. I used to lead an every …