Why you need to GET TO THE DAMN POINT!

How many hours do you think we spend in meetings in the United States annually? A few hundred? Ten thousand?

The answer: 19,004…YEARS worth of time.

Do the math:

In the United States alone we have 220,000,000 meetings annually. Assuming each of those meetings were only one minute long (that would be cause for a major celebration and a Hallelujah chorus!) that would merely be 220,000,000 minutes spent in meetings.

But no, the average meeting is between 31 and 60 minutes. If you average that you get 45.5 minutes. Multiply that times the 220 million and you get 10,010,000,000 minutes.

The number of minutes in a year is 525,600. So divide that 10 billion, 10 million by this and you get 19,004 YEARS worth of minutes used up annually.

According to a Forbes article, 71% of meetings are unproductive and inefficient. That means 13,492 years are wasted annually and that equates to billions of dollars lost not to mention productivity drops.

We try to fix it with things like “A two pizza meeting”; “Standing room only meeting” or (my favorite) “Let’s invite only who needs to be there.” Duh. Now you have only those who need to be there standing for an hour and eating pizza getting more ticked off by the second.

Why? Because the person presenting hasn’t been trained and they have taken the low hanging fruit of slapping together a powerless and pointless slide deck that they are now droning like Ben Stein’s character in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” while they read it.

As a friend once said upon leaving a meeting that took her out of her office and made her drive an hour and a half away, “I know how to read. Send me the PDF.”

I am pioneering that poor communication soft skills are killing the single most valuable asset you have: your time.

I watched an interview on TV where a lady spoke about her nonprofit that lasted just under 5 minutes. I edited it down to just her speaking which accounted for three minutes and eleven seconds. In that time, she had over 70 filler words (I call killer words). Those are words such as “well, but, so, like, you know, um, ah…” that people say because they don’t want silence.

I edited it again to just those words and it was thirty seven seconds worth. That’s longer than a commercial break. Had she been speaking for thirty minutes, she would have lost six minutes to these alone.

It’s excruciating to hear. You can find it on my website.

Who normally gets speaking, presentation and media training? The C-suite and middle management. Clearly they recognize the value in it, but they don’t understand the value in teaching everyone.

I propose you train your entire team because every person is an ambassador of your business and they are the ones leading the most meetings.

Time is money it’s said. I disagree. Money has never had, doesn’t have nor will ever have the value of time. On your deathbed, are you asking for another dollar or another minute?

Make people start getting to the damn point.

Reduce the minutes, gain the years.