Meeting Miser Proves It: Time Is Money

Meetings are known productivity killers, but how much productivity they push six feet under has not been easy to quantify. Until now.

Seattle-based Payscale, an online compensation firm, on Tuesday launched Meeting Miser, a web app that measures a meeting's duration and estimated cost, based on attendees' salaries.

Here's how it works: Open the widget in your browser, and select a meeting location. Next, enter the meeting attendees by their titles. Click the start button and watch the meter run.

Meeting Miser isn't perfect: Some job titles don't exist in its database. You have to type in job titles, because there's no dropdown menu. You can't adjust salaries, and it only allows one location to be entered, so regional salary differences of virtual attendees connected by conference call, VoIP, or web conferencing aren't reflected.

It's not a sophisticated app, but Meeting Miser makes its point. My suggestion for version 2.0: add an Ants-in-Pants feature that enables attendees to drag and drop virtual ants onto Meeting Miser's interface. This alerts the meeting leader to hurry things along. More ants, more urgency to adjourn, so everybody can get back to work.