By way of this post by John Hollon on Workforce.com (Workforce Management magazine): How Much do Bad Meetings Really Cost?, we found the Meeting Miser, a wonderful little tool for calculating the cost of a meeting.

The Meeting Miser is available on Payscale.com, and if you are not careful, you can waste valuable time playing with it!

Using the Meeting Miser, I can see that a meeting at my office in Montreal Quebec, between myself and four colleagues would cost the company approximately $5.00 per minute, or $300 per hour. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like much, but considering the number of meetings that many companies indulge in, and the fact that many meetings have even more participants, the costs can be staggering over time.

More people in our flattening world are gaining an understanding of the MESS (management by Meetings, Email, SpreadSheets) that is eating up our productivity. Tools like Meeting Miser–even if it is just a fun widget–are raising awareness about the real costs of the MESS.