If a company-wide meeting attended by five hundred employees isn’t engaging or memorable, then the company will have wasted five hundred people-hours—ten thousand dollars if you assume a twenty-dollar-per-person hourly wage. Spending even five hours of five people’s time (five hundred dollars total) to prepare for that meeting is undoubtedly worth it. Even one recurring weekly meeting with a handful of attendees can translate to thousands of dollars of wasted productivity over the course of a year if that time together isn’t well spent.

After the meeting, the follow-ups need to be treated with as much care as the preparation. A single meeting is not an end unto itself; it is a stepping-stone in the much longer path of creating something valuable for the world. In the last few minutes of a meeting, get into the habit of asking, “So before we break, let’s make sure we agree on next steps . . .” After the meeting, send out a recap to the attendees with a summary of the discussion, a list of specific action items and who is responsible for each, and when the next check-in will be.

If a decision was made, then that should be communicated to the right people. If feedback was given, then that should be acted upon. If ideas were generated, then the meeting organizer should clarify what the process is to take those to the next stage. These follow-ups can then anchor the agenda for when the group reconvenes.

Systematic time management is therefore the next step. One has to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can. This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.

1. First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever. To find these time-wastes, one asks of all activities in the time records: “What would happen if this were not done at all?” And if the answer is, “Nothing would happen,” then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it. …

1. The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?” … “Delegation” as the term is customarily used, is a misunderstanding—is indeed misdirection. But getting rid of anything that can be done by somebody else so that one does not have to delegate but can really get to one’s own work—that is a major improvement in effectiveness.

1. A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes. There is no one symptom for this. But there is still a simple way to find out. That is to ask other people. Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive…

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

This is particularly true with respect to time spent working with people, which is, of course, a central task in the work of the executive. People are time-consumers. And most people are time-wasters.

To spend a few minutes with people is simply not productive. If one wants to get anything across, one has to spend a fairly large minimum quantum of time. The manager who thinks that he can discuss the plans, direction, and performance of one of his subordinates in fifteen minutes—and many managers believe this—is just deceiving himself. If one wants to get to the point of having an impact, one needs probably at least an hour and usually much more. And if one has to establish a human relationship, one needs infinitely more time.

Systematic time management is therefore the next step. One has to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can. This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.

1. First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever. To find these time-wastes, one asks of all activities in the time records: “What would happen if this were not done at all?” And if the answer is, “Nothing would happen,” then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it. …

1. The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?” … “Delegation” as the term is customarily used, is a misunderstanding—is indeed misdirection. But getting rid of anything that can be done by somebody else so that one does not have to delegate but can really get to one’s own work—that is a major improvement in effectiveness.

1. A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes. There is no one symptom for this. But there is still a simple way to find out. That is to ask other people. Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive…

Managers, however, need to be equally concerned with time-loss that results from poor management and deficient organization. Poor management wastes everybody’s time—but above all, it wastes the manager’s time.

1. The first task here is to identify the time-wasters which follow from lack of system or foresight. The symptom to look for is the recurrent “crisis,” the crisis that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again…

‘A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.’...

1. Time-wastes often result from overstaffing…

‘Specialists that may be needed once in a while, or that may have to be consulted on this or on that, should always remain outside. It is infinitely cheaper to go to them and consult them against a fee than to have them in the group to say nothing of the impact an underemployed but overskilled man has on the effectiveness of the entire group. All he can do is mischief.’

1. Another common time-waster is malorganization. Its symptom is an excess of meetings.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time…

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done…

Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. Too many meetings signify that work that should be in one job or in one component is spread over several jobs or several components. They signify that responsibility is diffused and that information is not addressed to the people who need it…

1. The last major time-waster is malfunction in information… Even worse, but equally common, is information in the wrong form.