How to quickly see how many hours in the last year you spent in business meetings

Advertisement

Council_of_Elrond_ _FOTR

Warner Bros./New Line Cinema

Advertisement

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.

Complimentary Tech Event
Transform talent with learning that works
Capability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More

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.

Advertisement

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:

meetings screenshot

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:

meetings days

Jell

Advertisement

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.

NOW WATCH: 10 habits you should break to be more productive in 2016