Billionaire Mark Cuban. John Lamparski/Getty Images
In a conversation, billionaire Mark Cuban called out the number one time waster in the office.
Cuban says he only attends meetings and phone calls when there is “no other way.”
Earlier in his career, Cuban held standing meetings to ensure they ended faster.
This is a machine translation of an article by our US colleagues at Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor. We welcome feedback at the end of the article.
If you think that most work meetings could be shortened by email, you’re in very affluent company.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban called out in June in a conversation with the Author Chris Voss on the Fireside streaming platform to avoid meetings and phone calls. Cuban does his best to avoid meetings and phone calls, believing they hamper productivity in the workplace.
“It takes so much time”
“I try to only attend meetings when I need to come to a conclusion or there’s no other option — the same goes for phone calls,” Cuban told Voss, “It takes so much time.”
According to the Shark Tank star, when he attends meetings, most get lost in small talk and distract from talking about the important items on the agenda. His attitude toward meetings hasn’t changed since the early days of his career, when he ran meetings standing up.
“It’s amazing how quickly meetings go by when nobody has a chair or a place to sit,” he said in the interview.
He’s not the only manager who thinks meetings are a waste. Earlier this month, Shopify bosses rolled out a plugin for employees to track the dollar amount spent during a meeting. According to the company’s COO, this was an attempt to reduce the number of meetings so employees could “get shit done.”
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Now, as a manager, Cuban has more control over his own schedule, and he’s taking advantage of that. E-mails are his preferred form of communication about work.
“I can answer these in the middle of the night. Or I can answer them on my schedule instead of having to arrange everything around other people,” Cuban said.
Despite his success and wealth, Cuban is determined to keep working. In an October 2022 interview, the billionaire said that retirement was not yet an option for him because he was “too competitive.”
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