少开会，多省钱:4大实战高招避免会议成灾浪费钱

    避免时间碎片化。许多公司会间隔30或60分钟安排会议，但富勒指出，大量研究显示，人在被打断之后至少需要15分钟时间才能重新集中精神，“如果在下一次会议之前的时间不足一个小时，那就很难保持高效率。”他建议，尽可能安排连续会议，使得每个人每天都能有一大段不被打扰的时间，集中做好自己的实际工作。

    实行审批。富勒说：“用于开会的时间之所以失去控制，是因为在大多数公司，没有人负责统计时间。没有人决定必要的会议时长。”为了解决这个问题，VoloMetrix的一些客户将时间预算纳入了财政预算。富勒说：“在每一个新的研发周期或其他类型的项目开始时，负责人都要设定会议预算，把它作为总体开支的一部分。会议预算需要经过同样的审批过程。”他补充道，有些管理人员最初怀有抵触心理，但亲自做过计算之后就会转变态度。富勒表示，在一家大型生物科技公司，首席财务官“预计公司高薪聘请的大量员工每年用于开会的时间总计为60,000个小时。在被告知需要削减开会时间时，他非常生气。后来，他亲眼看到了计算数据，了解了用于开会的时间将给公司造成的实际损失。于是，他改变了自己的想法。”（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    Avoid time fragmentation. At lots of companies, meetings are scheduled with 30 or 60-minute blocks of time between them, but Fuller points to reams of research showing that it takes people at least 15 minutes to regain focus after an interruption, and “it’s difficult to be productive when you have less than an hour until your next meeting.” Whenever possible, he suggests, schedule meetings back-to-back, so that everyone gets a big block of uninterrupted time each day to concentrate on their actual work.

    Require authorization. “Time spent in meetings really gets out of control because, in most companies, no one is counting,” Fuller says. “There’s no one deciding how much meeting time is really necessary.” To fix that, some VoloMetrix clients have made time budgeting part of financial budgets. “At the start of each new product-development cycle or other kind of project, the person in charge sets a meeting budget as part of the total cost,” Fuller says. “And it has to go through the same approval process.” He adds that some managers resist this at first—until they do the math. At one large biotech company, the chief financial officer “was expecting his large staff of highly paid people to spend a total of 60,000 hours a year in meetings, and he got annoyed at being told he had to cut that down,” Fuller says. “Then he saw the figures on what all those hours actually cost the company in dollars, and he changed his mind.”