By Peter Bregman
Harvard Business Review (www.hbr.org)

Nate Eisman* recently started working for a large consulting firm after many years as an independent consultant. He called me a few days ago for some advice.

"I'm wasting a tremendous amount of time," he complained to me, "I'm in meetings all day. The only way I can get any real work done is by coming in super early and staying super late."

Nate had gone from an organization of one to an organization of several thousand and was drowning in the time suck of collaboration. He is not alone.

I recently surveyed the top 400 leaders of a 120,000 person company and found that close to 95% of them — that's 380 out of 400 — pointed to three things that wasted their time the most: unnecessary meetings, unimportant emails, and protracted PowerPoints.

Working with people takes time. And different people have different priorities. So someone may need your perspective on an issue that's important to him but not to you. Still, if he's a colleague, it's important to help. And often we want to help.

On the other hand, we've all felt Nate's pain. The question is: how can we spend time where we add the most value and let go of the rest? 

Click here to read more.