Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School and her colleagues surveyed 182 senior managers from a diverse set of companies. They found that 65 percent said meetings prevented them from completing their own work, 71 percent found their meetings unproductive and inefficient, and 64 percent said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. As a result of my audit, I went on a deep calendar cleanse. I purged myself of meetings I wasn’t really contributing to. When I wanted to stay in the loop about relevant decisions, I asked the meeting organizers to include me on pre- and post-meeting notes.
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