At Amazon, meetings do not begin with slides. Before the meeting, someone writes a six-page narrative memo. The meeting then opens with everyone reading the memo in silence. In his letter to shareholders published in April 2018, Jeff Bezos called this “a kind of ‘study hall.'”
The Cost of a Thing
In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau defines price in his own way: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” The sentence is in the first chapter, titled “Economy.”
Thoreau keeps the accounting, but he counts in life instead of dollars.
Cheaper by the Dozen
Frank Gilbreth was an American pioneer of time and motion study. Two of his children, Frank Jr. and Ernestine, wrote about him in Cheaper by the Dozen (1948), which became a film in 1950. Their father buttoned his vest from the bottom up, because it took him three seconds instead of seven. He also found a way to cut seventeen seconds off his shaving time.
For a while he shaved with two razors at once, but he finally gave that up. “It wasn’t the slashed throat that really bothered him. It was the two minutes.”
Paying to Skip the Line
On October 19, 2021, Walt Disney World launched Genie+. For $15 a day, guests could use Lightning Lane entrances at more than 40 attractions instead of the regular lines. The paid service replaced FastPass, which had been free.
The Price of an Hour of Travel
The U.S. Department of Transportation gives its analysts a dollar value for travel time. The guidance notes that many of its actions “are designed to benefit travelers by reducing the time spent in traveling.”
In the 2016 guidance, an hour of local personal travel was worth $13.60, and an hour of local business travel $25.40, in 2015 dollars. A project that saves travelers hours can count those hours as a benefit in dollars.
The Hours on the Tax Form
The IRS publishes an estimate of how much time Americans spend on their tax returns. It defines the burden as “the time and money taxpayers spend to comply with their tax filing responsibilities.”
In September 2024 it estimated, in preliminary figures for fiscal year 2025, that Form 1040 and related forms take 2.266 billion hours a year, or 13 hours and 6 minutes per filer. It put the total burden, in time and money, at $92.4 billion.
Paid by the Hour
In 2006 the Stanford researchers Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer reported that people who are paid by the hour think about their time in terms of money. Using U.S. Census survey data, they found that people paid hourly spend about 36 percent less time volunteering than salaried people.
In a further study, salaried people who calculated their hourly pay changed too. “Once the value of their hour was made plain to them, they began to think more like hourly employees.”
Punching the Clock
In 1888 Willard Bundy, a jeweler in Auburn, New York, invented a time clock that recorded when each worker arrived and left. His brother founded the Bundy Manufacturing Company a year later. Through mergers in 1900 and 1911, the business became part of the company later named IBM. Americans still punch in and punch out.
In 2024, 55.6 percent of American wage and salary workers were paid by the hour. Federal rules let employers round clock times to the nearest 5 minutes, or to the nearest tenth or quarter of an hour. Rounding is accepted only if, over time, it does not leave employees unpaid for time they actually worked.
The Billable Hour
American lawyers record their working time in tenths of an hour. The system goes back to Reginald Heber Smith, who joined the Boston firm Hale and Dorr in 1919. His timesheet was divided into six-minute units, because, he wrote, “I can more easily add, subtract, and divide on the decimal system.” The American Bar Association published his system in 1940.
Firms now set annual targets. Justice Stephen Breyer has said: “There is tremendous pressure on younger lawyers to produce 2,000, 2,200, 2,400 billable hours.” A Yale Law School estimate found that 2,200 billable hours a year require being at work 59 hours a week.
This Meeting Could Have Been an Email
This meeting could have been an email. Americans say it after a meeting that wasted their time.
In 2019 the scheduling company Doodle estimated that pointless meetings would cost organizations in the United States about $400 billion that year. The figure is the company’s own estimate, based on more than 19 million meetings in four countries.