I had the fortune of spending a year studying in another country. I study aerospace engineering, and so there's a lot of teamwork. Last year (in Canada) we work

I had the fortune of spending a year studying in another country. I study aerospace engineering, and so there's a lot of teamwork. Last year (in Canada) we worked on a project with 20+ undergrads. We had 3 hours of meetings a week, made up of presentations, discussion etc. This year (in the UK) I'm working in a team of four people. I've achieved significantly more this year than I did last year. Perhaps the biggest reason is that when you have a team of four, every hour you spend meeting involves approximately 15 minutes talking about the problems you're having, and discussing the solutions to your problems. In the team of 20, I'd go to a meeting, spend three hours there and 2 of them would be taken up by a particular aspect of the project. I wasn't working on it, and how they implemented that problem had absolutely no bearing on my work. Meetings, or at least irrelevant unproductive meetings, are a huge time sink. At least half of the time spent in those meetings could have certainly been spent doing other, productive, tasks.