The New York Times recently ran a story about CEO Larry Page’s efforts to reform Google. As a first step, he fired his secretary because she was scheduling too many meetings for him. Page understood that many meetings lack focus and fail to achieve any meaningful objective—using up time that he could have spent doing actual work. This wasted time is no small beans for American businesses: meetings take up approximately 35% of the workday (pdf) for middle managers, and up to 60% of the day (pdf) for top executives.

What can organizations and their employees do to mitigate the burden of unproductive meetings?To start with, you should avoid meetings whenever possible:

• Many routine meetings (status reports, etc) can be replaced with a brief email thread.
• Some firms, like MFS, schedule one free day every month when meetings cannot be scheduled—allowing employees to catch up on work, and also showing them just how much they can get done when they don’t have to go to meetings.
• If you’ve been invited by your boss to a meeting you predict will be unproductive, learn how to say “yes, but…” to politely explain your workload. If your boss understands the cost of your attendance at the meeting, he or she may reconsider whether or not you really need to be there. Of course, such a dialogue requires you to have a trusting relationship with your boss.
• Keep meetings as short as possible. Different meetings call for different lengths, but absolutely nothing will get done past the 90-minute mark. How do you keep them short? Meetings will expand to fill allotted time, but they will also contract. As Saul Kaplan, the founder of the Business Information Factory put it: “Meetings are like a gas expanding to fill all available space.”

Of course, some meetings are unavoidable. For the meetings that are necessary, here is how I believe they should be run:

• Have an agenda that makes sense—and stick to it.
• Distribute materials at least a day in advance, or else people won’t have time to read them.
• Any introductory presentation must be less than fifteen minutes long. The organization gains nothing from a group “read-in” of the introductory materials or an hour-long PowerPoint presentation.
• After the introduction, there must be stimulating debate that challenges assumptions and the beliefs of the higher-ups. In too many meetings, people are afraid to pose potential drawbacks, or disagree with their boss.
• At the end of the meeting, attendees should agree on the next steps and deadlines. If the boss imposes these follow-ups, people will not be as motivated to achieve them.

By following these tips, your organization can reduce the time that workers spend in meetings—freeing up more of their valuable day to accomplish something productive. For meetings that absolutely must happen, the fundamental approach needs to change: the real value of a meeting does not come from the sharing of facts, but from vigorous debate that can generate new insights from the group.