Endless meetings? Your schedule can be tamed

IMAGINE SPENDING TWO FULL DAYS each week just sitting in meetings. Oh, wait—you already do. And, a Bain & Company study found, most leaders rate more than half of these get-togethers as ineffective. Yet the calendar creep continues: “The percentage of time an organization collectively spends in meetings has increased every year since 2008,” says Michael Mankins, a partner at Bain and co-author of Time, Talent, Energy. When Mankins and his partners dove deep into this issue, they found the average manager spends just 6.5 hours a week