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What If I Told You That, Potentially, 85% Of Your Job Is Meaningless?
I feel like just diving into the deep end here, so let’s start with this quote:
Cross shares the opinion that a collaborative organizational structure can be a drain on people’s time and resources: people can be “emailed to death and meetinged to death.” He cites a statistic that most knowledge workers and leaders spend 85% or more of each week on email, meetings and on the phone, which suggests there’s little time left over to perform individualized tasks.
Not surprising. There was a story a few years ago about a company (health insurance, I believe) where one weekly meeting took up 300,000 hours (yes, 300,000) of manpower per year. You could argue that’s mostly admins and middle people getting slide decks and bullet points ready, but that’s still 300,000 hours. Say you work 40 hours a week and take 4 weeks vacation. That’s 40 x 48, or 1,920 working hours in a year. That means this one meeting took the time of 156 full-time employees in a year to manage.
