I can’t begin to tell you how many brain cells I’ve lost over my career attending senseless, wasteful, mind-numbing meetings. When I left one employer after more than 11 years on the job, I calculated that I had attended in excess of 11,000 meetings during my time there – and those were just the regularly scheduled ones that I could easily count. Add in special or unscheduled meetings, and I easily was up around 13,000 meetings in less than 12 years. Some were necessary, but many were futile and wasteful. I’d be surprised if more than 10 percent of them were truly productive.

This all came to mind this morning when I read a new survey by NFI Research that found that 57 percent of business leaders spend 21 percent to 60 percent of their time each week in internal meetings. Some 56 percent of the executives found half of their meetings to be productive, a stunning figure when you consider that these same executives considered the other half of the meetings they attended to be unproductive.

“While meetings are a necessity of businesses, some organizations can tend to go overboard with internal gatherings, which can take away from a customer focus, if not vigilant,” NFI chief executive Chuck Martin said in a press release that announced the survey findings. I hear what Chuck is saying, but I think he’s understating the issue. Structured, tightly focused meetings with a clear purpose and goal can serve a business purpose, but as the great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once noted, “Never mistake activity for achievement.” Meetings should never be confused with actually taking action and getting things accomplished. At best, they’re a road map to focus the participants on what needs to get done.

Monty Python’s John Cleese made a funny motivational video about this—it’s called, appropriately enough, “Meetings, Bloody Meetings”—but embedded in the classic Cleese humor are some smart tips on how to make sure that meetings are effective and productive.

I have a million stories about all those meetings that I have given so many brain cells for, but the one that sticks out most is when this brutish tyrant of a boss I was working for told me that the daily afternoon scheduling meeting I ran was TOO efficient and made TOO many decisions TOO early in the day. He took over running the meeting, and of course, he failed to make any real decisions on anything, procrastinating long into the evening and driving everyone crazy. His sterling decision-making abilities drove the company to “encourage” him to take “early retirement” a few years later.

Do you have any great business meeting stories? If so, I’d love to hear about them, either by posting a comment here or sending me an e-mail at jhollon@workforce.com.