Apparently in 2005 the average working person spent 5.6 hours in meetings. And in 2006, it seems that this average has gone up to 16 hours per week!!

This week, admittedly a fairly busy one, I have 22 hours of meetings to fill my working days. It does seem that sometimes we have meetings about the meetings we are going to have, and then meetings to let everyone know about the meeting. And then of course we need status meetings to check everyone is doing their actions :)

Unfortunately the 2007 Beta does not provide the solution to meeting etiquette and productivity. But.... it can help when you have to schedule those 10s of meetings every week with multiple attendees each week.

This takes me back to my university days. When I was studying, I temped every holiday and did a lot of secretarial and administration work, and I remember the pain and long hours trying to arrange meetings with multiple attendees. This gets even worse when you have to book other meetings with different attendees which are dependent on the first meeting taking place. Looking at all these calendars and trying to view them side by side, and the text becoming too small to read when you open more than 3 at a time... It is a huge headache!

Well, this is where the 2007 Beta can help. A really cool feature of Outlook calendaring is Overlay Mode. Just click on the little arrow next to the name of the calendar you are viewing, and this places that calendar over your own and you can view all the appointments on top of each other. This becomes very useful when you are looking for free space in more than a few people's calendars.

So, at least when I’ve got the task of booking all those meetings that seem to flood the working week, it is a much quicker and far less stressful process.