In the last seven years, Phil Gerbyshak figures he has spent three to five hours a day every workday in a meeting. Of that time, he figures 25 percent of that time was well spent.

"Doing business face to face is so important, but we're always waiting for people, or we start meetings late or there's all this personal chat and sidebar conversations," says Gerbyshak, vice president for a financial services company in Milwaukee. "I'm always sitting there thinking about all the things my team could be doing instead of wasting so much time."

Meetings have always been the bane of any workplace, but with a leaner work force now being asked to take on more tasks, the time spent in meetings is even more precious to time-strapped workers.

At the same time, workers don't want to miss the important "face time" with bosses that meetings can give them, especially when they need a strong connection to the boss to hang on to their jobs.

Bill Lampton, a motivational speaker and communications coach in Atlanta, says he gets "enraged" when a committee chair says the meeting attendees need to wait "for a couple of important members who are not here yet."

"Strange, but I thought I was an important member myself," Lampton says. "Imagine that 12 people wait 10 minutes for the late arrivals. That's 120 minutes, or two hours totally wasted."

Mike Song, a productivity speaker, says many meeting problems could be solved with a few tweaks.

"When you schedule meetings back to back, you're going to have meeting dominoes. One runs late, and then that throws all of them off. Instead of scheduling them to last 60 minutes, you schedule them to last 50 minutes, and that gives you time to get to the next one," he says.

Gerbyshak says meetings often bog down when agendas are misplaced, which Song says can be solved by sending agendas electronically so that it can be easily accessed via a laptop or Blackberry or iPhone when needed. "Now the agenda is strapped to your hip," Song says. "No more waiting around."

Lampton says he wishes more meeting chairs would stop meetings from stretching out to "ghastly limits" by allowing "motormouths" to ramble on and on. Song says he calls these people "Ted Tangents" who need to be put on the spot by the chair noting that the speaker has moved off topic.

"Then, he asks Ted Tangent, 'Is this topic more urgent or important?' than what is on the agenda?" Song says. "Nine out of 10 times it's not more important, and Ted starts to realize he's going off into la-la land."

In a new book with Vicki Halsey and Tim Burress called "The Hamster Revolution for Meetings: How to Meet Less and Get More Done," (Berrett-Koehler, $19.95), Song gives some other tips for meetings: