The summer months are beginning to heat up as people are balancing heavy workloads and packed schedules with vacation time and other priorities. One way to get some time back in the workday is to make meetings as efficient as possible and eliminate the unnecessary meetings that plague most organizations. The Centre for Economics and Business reports that the average office worker sits in meetings about four hours a week and feels the majority of that time is wasted.

In the next month as you look at your schedules, consider the following recommendations for making your meetings more productive and eliminating unnecessary meetings. These three simple strategies guide all meetings—one-time as well as recurring ones.

• Be conservative with meeting invites. Invite only key stakeholders, not "spectators." A cap of three to five people is recommended for decision-making meetings.
• Every meeting must have an owner. Cancel meetings that lack a clear owner who keeps it on track.
• Schedule meetings if (and only if) other methods of communicating won't cut it. Consider whether another forum, such as e-mail or a Lync chat, can accomplish the same result.

As a reminder, we have agenda templates to help keep your meeting succinct, organized, and on track.

From Dropbox via inc.com.