Meetings can be both a waste of time as well as a constructive use of time depending on how they are managed. 🙂
Google Calendar provides a good way to ensure that meetings to be created don’t drag on way past their fixed duration. This is particularly important if there are back-to-back meetings and that if one meeting goes past it’s arranged cut off time, this may affect subsequent meetings.
To do this :
Log in to Google Calendar and access “Settings” from the top right gear icon.
From the “General” tab, scroll down and enable the tick mark next to “Speedy meetings”. Hit “Save” at bottom of page to save this changes.
What this does is automatically shave off time from meetings of various lengths that are to be created so that 30 minutes meeting ends 5 minutes early, 60 minutes meetings ends 10 minutes early and so on.
So once this feature is enabled, the default meeting length is automatically revised as 25 minutes, 50 minutes, 80 minutes and 110 minutes instead of the default length of 30 minutes, 60 minutes and 120 minutes. (15 minutes meeting length stays as it is).
Do give it a try, those reduced times per meeting can add up quickly to a lot of free time. 🙂