In April, the work management platform Asana decided to conduct an internal experiment. Workers were asked to assess the value of the time they spent on meetings, and then to delete all recurring meetings with five or fewer participants. They sat with an empty calendar for 48 hours, before adding back in all the meetings they saw as valuable.

“Employees changed them to shorter, unconventional lengths. Thirty minute meetings were cut to 15 minutes, and the cadence was made less frequent,” says Rebecca Hinds, productivity expert at Asana. “The final part of the process was for them to calculate how much time they spent in meetings after the audit.” On average, people saved 11 hours per month, which equates to 17 days over the course of a year, or three and a half weeks, Hinds says.

According to Asana’s survey of over 10,000 employees, 40 percent of workers are spending more time on video calls compared to last year, and 52 percent are multitasking more during me