To put things in perspective, in the 1960s executives spent about 10 hours/week in meetings. By 2017, that number ballooned to almost 23 hours a week on average. According to The Atlantic, since the start of the pandemic, with more people working remotely, the number of online work meetings has more than doubled and continues to increase.

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"People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic," said Mary Czerwinski, the research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft. "That means everything else—like coding [work] and email and writing—is being pushed later."

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Because of this huge increase in meetings, people are losing time for their own individual work, leading people to work longer hours, The Atlantic reports. According to research from Microsoft, the average workday has increased by 13%, or around an hour, since March 2020, and the average length of after-hours work has increased by twice as much.

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Do you REALLY need to have that standing meeting? If so, always make sure the value of the juice is worth the squeeze.