CONSIDER IT A FORCED BREAK FROM YOUR WEB BROWSING....:

Given that the hours taken up by meetings increase when the profit motive is absent--a 2013 study by officebroker.com found that the average office worker spends 16 hours in meetings every week; government workers spend 22 hours a week in meetings--many companies have their own homeopathic cure for meeting madness.

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos starts executive meetings with 30 minutes of silence and has everyone read a carefully crafted six-page report. That's still a waste of 30 minutes. Some executives at Twitter and Apple set aside Mondays for meetings; the rest of the week is for full days of actual work. BuzzFeed President Jon Steinberg is more lenient; he sets aside Tuesdays and Thursdays as "no meeting" days. Someone I met who runs a music startup bans electronics, restricts meetings to a single topic--and limits them to 10 minutes.

Here's a trick I've seen a few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs employ at board meetings. When an investor or outside board member asks a stupid question, the CEO says "that's a great question" and then gives the questioner an action item, something like: "OK, can you survey the competition and report back on their capital plans and hiring ratios? Great, let's keep going." Eventually the stupid questions dry up and people who ask them may stop coming to the meetings. Perfect.

But my favorite meeting cure was practiced by Craig Benson, a founder of the networking company Cabletron Systems in the 1980s and governor of New Hampshire from 2003-05. At Cabletron, he ripped out conference-room tables and chairs and replaced them with bar-height tables and, get this, footrests. Meetings magically were on point and ended quickly. No one has time for preening when everyone is shifting weight from foot to foot.

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