# Meetings Are Broken. It's Time for a Meeting Doomsday. > Learn how to rescue your team from calendar chaos with a Meeting Doomsday—an experiment designed to make your meetings more productive and regain wasted time. Source: https://asana.com/resources/meetings-broken-doomsday ## Meetings are broken. It's time for a meeting doomsday. _This article was originally published on_[Inc](https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/meetings-are-broken-its-time-for-a-meeting-doomsday.html)_._ [Meetings](https://www.inc.com/rebecca-deczynski/asana-anatomy-of-work-index-meetings-remote-work-efficiency.html) are one of the biggest time sinks in organizations today. They consistently sabotage employees' [productivity](https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/how-to-inspire-productive-collaboration-avoid-burnout.html)—especially in our new era of hybrid work. Why? They've become the panacea for many other activities—coffee chats, brainstorming, happy hours, and more. Research by Harvard Business School professors found that as the pandemic unfolded, employees added [13 percent](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/you-re-right-you-are-working-longer-and-attending-more-meetings) more meetings to their calendars.  As a leader, the shift to remote and hybrid work gives you an opportunity to hit the reset button on unproductive meetings. Yet meetings are an intrinsic part of your organization's culture. So, if you want to change the status quo, you need to think outside the box and shift mindsets—not just behaviors. Take a look at your calendar. If you or your employees are scheduling the vast majority of your meetings weekly, and for 30 minutes, something is wrong. Each meeting has a different purpose, so if most of your meetings are the same length, you haven't thought enough about how your meetings ought to be designed to maximize productivity. At my workplace, Asana, we [recently conducted an experiment to help employees boost meeting productivity](/resources/fixing-meetings-playbook).  I worked with one of our internal teams to cleanse employees' calendars of meetings that had become less productive over time. The experiment was inspired by an [activity](https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds-and-bob-sutton/dropbox-secret-for-saving-time-in-meetings.html) that Bob Sutton and I studied a few years ago—but updated for our hybrid work era. I call it meeting doomsday. And it's an experiment that you, too, can perform to make your meetings more productive and regain wasted time.  Here's what a meeting doomsday looks like:  ## 1. Conduct a meeting audit Many employees don't know how much time they squander in meetings. They often happen at different cadences—like every week or every six weeks—which can distort employees' perceptions of how much time they actually spend in meetings.  The first step of doomsday involves conducting a meeting audit. Each employee evaluates their recurring meetings and identifies which ones lack value. For us, we discovered most of these meetings were once productive but had grown in size or scope and needed to be reevaluated. To assess whether a meeting is valuable, ask: Did the meeting help advance your work forward more quickly than you would have been able to do asynchronously?  ## 2. Schedule your meeting doomsday Simply conducting an audit and offering some platitudes about reducing meetings won't lead to meaningful change in your company's meeting culture.  This is when the best part of doomsday happens. During this part of the process, have your team delete all their recurring meetings from their calendars.  Employees often feel that if they delete meetings, other attendees will take it as a personal affront. An official doomsday will give employees permission to delete their meetings without feeling guilty. We gave participants a blurb to share with cross-functional meeting participants to explain that doomsday was coming—and the intent behind it.  After deleting their meetings, have your employees sit with their newly cleansed calendars for 48 hours. Then, have them repopulate their calendars, but only with those meetings that are valuable—according to their own meeting audit.  We found that when employees were given the freedom to step back and assess, they changed many of their meetings to be shorter, unconventional lengths (like 15 minutes). They also changed the cadence of meetings to be less frequent.  ## 3. Celebrate the time savings No experiment is complete without measuring the results, and a doomsday is no exception. Be sure to carve out time to crunch the numbers. Have each of your employees calculate how much time they saved by comparing the time they spent in meetings after doomsday with their initial meeting audit.  For us, the results were impressive. Over the course of the one-month experiment, participants saved an average of 11 hours per month by redesigning meetings that were no longer productive. That equates to each individual saving 17 workdays over the course of a year. That whopping time savings could be reallocated to doing more meaningful work or taking time off—the time savings were equivalent to a three-and-a-half-week vacation.  If you want a structure that keeps your meetings productive after doomsday, try using an [L10 meeting template](https://asana.com/templates/l10-meeting). It helps teams turn time savings into lasting habits by tracking priorities, action items, and scorecards on a weekly basis. ## Embracing a meeting doomsday Your employees have preconceptions about what meetings should look like. They often don't spend enough time evaluating why meetings are on their calendar, or if they've been properly designed.  Even in highly productive workplaces, too many unnecessary meetings can sabotage anyone's day. I recommend that doomsday be conducted at least once a year. The more teams that participate in doomsday, the better, because there will be more horsepower aimed at eliminating wasteful meetings.  Now that you've gone and cleaned up that calendar clutter, you can focus on doing the work that matters most. 團隊成長與專注度 - [使用番茄工作法技巧提高專注力和生產力](/zh-tw/resources/pomodoro-technique) 生產力 #### 內容撰稿人 您是否曾因待辦事項清單而感到不勝負荷，並擔心無法按時完成所有任務？透過運用番茄工作法等時間管理策略，您可以最大化生產力，並有效掌控專案進度。 番茄工作法透過專注工作的循環與頻繁的短暫休息來進行。其概念是透過在短時間內不受打擾地工作，您可以同時提升生產力，並減少精神疲勞。若您與多位團隊成員共同負責多個專案，則可以使用這項技術將任務進行時間分段，從而減輕工作量 ... - [在工作中運用心流狀態力量的 6 個提示](/zh-tw/resources/flow-state-work) 生產力 #### 作者 工作時最棒的感受之一就是處於以下這種境界：感覺工作不費吹灰之力、外界事物彷彿消失不見，而且甚至忘卻了時間的流逝。 此境界有一個專門的名稱：心流狀態。當您處於心流狀態時，生產力和創意會大躍升，且完成出色的工作彷彿一點都不費吹灰之力。很幸運地，達成心流狀態並不如聽起來那麼困難。在本文中，我們會揭開心流的神秘面紗，幫助您在每天的工作中，進入心流。以下說明如何辦到 ... - [適用於團隊凝聚的 110 多個最佳破冰問題](/zh-tw/resources/icebreaker-questions-team-building) 靈感與影響力百寶箱 協作 #### 作者 破冰問題是指在會議、活動或社交場合開始時提出的輕鬆問題，旨在幫助參與者打破沉默、消除陌生感，並在短時間內建立對話和連結。在團隊工作中，破冰問題是促進團隊凝聚和協作的重要工具。您有多瞭解您的團隊成員？您很可能知道他們的工作方式、優缺點，以及哪些時間會上線，可以找到人。但您知道他們最喜愛的電影或來自哪裡嗎？又或者他們今年聽最多哪個樂手的音樂，或他們最喜歡哪個烘 ... - [15 個秘訣助您建立真正有用的待辦清單](/zh-tw/resources/make-better-to-do-lists) 專案管理 #### 作者 Everyone loves checking things off a to-do list, but when done wrong, lists can cause more harm than good. Disorganized lists lead to missed deadlines and unnecessary stress.The g ... - [Meetings are broken. It's time for a meeting doomsday.](/zh-tw/resources/meetings-broken-doomsday) 團隊成長與專注度 團隊成長與專注度 - [Work Innovation Lab 負責人](/author/rebecca-hinds) This article was originally published on Inc.Meetings are one of the biggest time sinks in organizations today. They consistently sabotage employees' productivity—especially in ou ...