Recently, an Associated Press article reported on a study suggesting that company staff meetings may "rank among the most inefficient exercises we perform." The study, conducted for GroupSystems Corp., included 130 responses from workers in organizations ranging from Intel to the U.S. Navy to George Washington University.

If you attend regular staff meetings at work, you might not be surprised that most respondents in this study found these meetings to often be too long, too poorly organized, and too unproductive, rarely resulting in implemented action items.

Many of us attend a lot of meetings. In fact, approximately 11 million meetings occur in the U.S. each day, and most managers attend about 60 meetings each month. That