(Photo Courtesy of <a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/emsl/4331028848/>EMSL via Flickr</a>.)

Meetings at work can be just dreadful – long, pointless and meandering. And when you’re in them, you’re not actually DOING anything.

“A meeting’s job is to make decisions or to kind of wrestle with problems and kind of organize. But they’re taking away from time to execute,” said Brandon Smith, a workplace consultant and leadership coach.

“A good back-of-the-envelope ratio is, you should always have at least two hours [to work] for every one hour of meeting time in your day,” he said.

Smith also said all those meetings can actually be punctual, productive and on-topic by following a few simple rules. Hear more in this week’s Working on GPB Radio.

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