The M word. It’s enough to strike fear in the heart of the savviest professionals. And no, I’m not talking about Millennials. That’s another blog post entirely.

Meetings. There are 25 million meetings per day in the United States, and the vast majority (67%, if you ask executives), are considered utterly worthless. Here are a few more stats to make you question your calendar, courtesy of Fuze.

• More than $37 billion per year is spent on unproductive meetings.
• Upper management spends nearly 50% of their time in meetings.
• A least half of you are reading this article while sitting in an unproductive meeting. Okay, that last stat may not be true. But 92% of survey respondents admit to multi-tasking during meetings.

While the digital world offers us endless solutions for communicating with our coworkers, there is no true substitute for gathering people face-to-face. Here at Brains, we Spend a lot of time working collaboratively. And since our inboxes and to-do lists aren’t getting any shorter, we spend a lot of time refining how we collaborate. One thing we’ve gotten to a science? Meeting etiquette.

The post How to Run Meetings & Not Suck Out People’s Souls appeared first on Brains on Fire.