During a project meeting

At this point in the book, we've talked about several essential components of meetings: agendas, parking lots, facilitation, meeting notes, and so on. Because a key component in managing a project is time, I want to focus on managing your time during the meeting. It's easy to forget the cost of conducting a meeting.

The cost of a meeting

We've probably all heard the old cliché "time is money". It's very true, and meetings are a perfect example.

Let's say you're a part of a project team that has seven other members (eight total). For the purposes of simple math, each person makes $50,000/annually. This doesn't include the cost of benefits. The total compensation for the entire team is $400,000 ($50,000 x 8).

The project plan is for one year. Let's also assume each person works 2,000 hours per year (that's 40 hours per week for 50 weeks). I know it might seem unrealistic, but it's a place to start. That puts each person's compensation at $25/hour ($50,000/2000). Here...