Hate all those wasted hours sitting in a meeting room listening to people go around in circles with no agenda and no action items? Not more than me! I have work to do, unless it’s needed for the development process to have a long, drawn out discussion. I want to have meetings that are short and to the point, start with an agenda and end with a list of tasks and dates when applicable. Want to drive home to participants in meetings the importance of brevity? Check out this cool web tool, the meeting calculator. You enter in how many people are in the meeting, what the average salary is, and then start the timer and it will tick away in dollars how much you are spending on your meeting. There are a few of these floating out there in web world, some very boring, and someone even built a physical product to take to meetings and time them in this way, but this one is my favorite..

The meeting timer.

Second up has to be the PayScale’s Meeting Miser, that asks you where you’re located and you select the job titles that are in the meeting and it does the math for you.

I’m not necessarily advocating bringing this to your next meeting, but it’s definitely an interesting link to email to your co-workers as a gentle nudge of awareness, eh? It’s also just an excellent visual to keep in mind for any manager, or anyone who runs meetings, to remind yourself to expedite whenever possible and to treat everyone’s time as precious.

Oh and I wasn’t that impressed with it, and I didn’t even download it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is an app on the iPhone that does this as well. I’m not linking to it – if you really want to find it, go search for meeting timer in the app store.