Warner Bros./New Line Cinema
Meetings, almost as much as "open offices," are hotly debated in the context of productivity. Are they a total waste of time? Are they great for collaboration? Kill them! Love them!
What is certain is that meetings still make up a substantial chunk of many people's working lives. And that doesn't seem like it's going to change any time soon.
But how much time do you actually spend in meetings? Jell, a startup that wants to minimize meetings through software, has built a nifty side project called "Meeting Calculator" to tell you just that.
Here's how it works.
First, you navigate to the Meeting Calculator website and connect to your Google Calendar (unfortunately it doesn't work with Outlook). The web app then scans your past events and identifies which were meetings based on certain pieces of data (eliminating ones without a definite start or end date, or that have less than two attendees, for instance). Then Meeting Calculator generates a report on how much of your life is devoted to meetings.
Here were my basic stats:
Jell
The tool also gives additional information, like the length of your meetings and the percentage that were created by you. Here was a particularly interesting tidbit from my own workflow, showing the day spread of my meetings:
Jell
And in case you are worried about offering up your data, here's the startup's note on privacy:
We'll ask for temporary read-only access to grab stats from your calendar events. We won't store any of your credentials or send you any emails or anything spammy like that.