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Welcome to election day 2024! 🇺🇸 

Unproductive meetings are even more annoying than political campaign texts. Thankfully, those end today.

According to Google, employees spend an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings. Basically wasting one work week each month.

There are 2 solutions:

1. Improve the meetings you have to attend

2. Stop being an employee

Let's get into it.

Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

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Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

A recent estimate suggests that employees endure a staggering 55 million meetings every day in the United States.

I bet you’re not surprised to learn that less than 20% of managers receive any formal training on how to run a meeting.

Professor Steven Rogelberg has real solutions to poor meetings. And while I had an office on the UNCC campus for 3 years, sadly we never crossed paths. Rogelberg draws from extensive research and interviews with 5,000+ employees across a range of industries to share proven practices that help managers and employees enhance the quality of meetings.

Rogelberg provides immediate direction, guidance, and relief, offering a how-to guide to change your working life starting today.

Do you waste 31 hours every month in unproductive meetings?

Don’t forget to calculate the “meeting anticipation” effect, where you’re less productive before a scheduled meeting, and the time it takes to refocus afterwards. All in all, that “quick” 30-minute meeting might actually cost you nearly an hour of productive time.

I know that I wasted a lot of employee time with poorly run meetings in my web development firm. Stopping work flow - especially for designers and coders - was a huge drag on productivity and cost me personally as I was funding the company.

Any interruption typically takes 20 minutes to get back into the flow.

The German study shows that employees get interrupted once every 4 minutes during a typical work day. Who gets anything done?

There are some well known tactics you can employ:

• Set specific times you answer email

• Schedule and block out extended periods of work time

• Implement the Pomodoro method for bursts of execution

• Take mini-breaks

• Lean into making your meetings better

Or – when you’ve finally had enough – stop being an employee altogether and start that thing you’ve been dreaming about.

Now go launch something 🚀 

Modern Tools

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He learns using information provided directly by you and becomes better over time. You can use Agent Frank in two modes: fully autonomous Auto-pilot and Co-pilot, where you can review and monitor his work.

Learn More

Old School Wisdom

In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite.

Free Knowledge

Need more research-backed ways to improve your meetings?

This older Forbes interview with Rogleberg has more recommendations.

Recommendations

🧠 Seven Deadly Stupidities : Discover the patterns that lead to failure and learn how to avoid them.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🏆 IDiyas : Weekly patent newsletter highlighting the most prolific inventors, engineers, executives and entrepreneurs.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🤓 Product-Led Geek : Get your FREE GROWTH TOOLKIT and join over 7000 founders and leaders learning how to scale their B2B software companies with product-led growth and product-led sales.

Visual Crapshoot