Meetings consume precious time like a SUV guzzles gas. I remember that Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary co-founder, once wrote that you need half a dozen approvals to buy a $5000 copier but can call a meeting of 20 managers – whose time costs far more – without anyone raising an eyebrow. The fact is, the time cost of meetings is enormous and usually overlooked.
Now, time spent on a well led, interactive, lively meeting is very well spent; but all too often meetings are long, boring and useless, especially when everyone is doing email… and when they drag on, or get into a rathole, nobody hears the jingle of money rolling down the drain.
Until now. I was delighted when my friend Paul Calame sent me a pointer to the product pictured here: the TIM (Time is Money) Meeting Cost Calculator & Clock.
You set the TIM up by inputting the number of attendees and their average salary, and the display ticks away the dollars, reminding everyone that they’d better stay focused and fast.
This fun product can be found here, and in the spirit of our time it even has a Facebook fan page… and, appropriately enough, you can buy it at the online Dilbert store 🙂
Meetings consume precious time like a SUV guzzles gas. I remember that Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary co-founder, once wrote that you need half a dozen approvals to buy a $5000 copier but can call a meeting of 20 managers – whose time costs far more – without anyone raising an eyebrow. The fact is, the time consumption of meetings is enormous and usually overlooked.
Now, time spent on a well led, interactive, lively meeting is very well spent; but all too often meetings are long, boring and useless, especially when everyone is doing email… and when they drag on, or get into a rathole, nobody hears the jingle of money rolling down the drain.
Until now. I was delighted when my friend Paul Calame sent me a pointer to the product pictured here: the TIM (Time is Money) Meeting Cost Calculator & Clock.
You set the TIM up by inputting the number of attendees and their average salary, and the display ticks away the dollars, reminding everyone that they’d better stay focused and fast.
This fun product can be found here, and in the spirit of our time is even a Facebook fan page for this product… and, appropriately enough, you can buy it at the online Dilbert store 🙂
There’s also this website: http://www.effectivemeetings.com/diversions/meetingclock.asp
I particularly like how big the numbers are 🙂
Oops, wrong link. Here’s the right one: http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/
Of course, there’s an app for that:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meeting-cost-free/id315979560?mt=8
🙂
I was bummed to hear that Brad stopped making these a few years back – the TIM clock was innovative and served a useful purpose. In our own testing around meeting costs, we found people responded well to this data initially but its effect wore off quickly – they became immune to seeing every meeting cost $500.
We tried to capture the same kind of meeting cost tool in a calculator that works on desktop or mobile device in a nice, touch-enabled and interactive app:
http://www.gotrackmeet.com/calculator