Send a meeting request and you can almost hear people groaning as they turn to dutifully enter the time in their calendars. Sitting in a conference room often serves to shorten attention spans and spur multitasking.

Web-based video meetings and conference calls only makes these behaviors worse. Sixty per cent of people on audio-only conference calls admitted to checking social media when they should have been listening to another attendee and another 6% admitted to dozing off, according to findings from cloud-based video conference company Blue Jeans Network. Then there’s always the chatty participant who can run their mouth and lead the entire discussion astray. Or worse, the attendees who don’t speak up at all because they don’t want to be criticized or fear the repercussions of disagreeing with their boss.

Despite these challenges, we spend as much as half our days in meetings, according to the same research. Yet, meetings are often the are the best vehicle for bringing people together to strategize and brainstorm. And while there’s a wealth of about making meetings more productive, a new a platform is promising to fix the things that people hate most about meetings.

Attentiv, which has just launched out of beta and has already signed up clients such as Ernst & Young, tackles everything from setting an agenda, to assigning action items, taking notes and offering a channel for anonymous communication. This feature, cofounder Daniel Russell says, is akin to Memo’s anonymous interoffice messaging system and works in real-time to gather feedback.

Russell argues that using a real-time stream, Attentiv helps the best ideas rise to the top. “It saves time by allowing everyone in the meeting to anonymously answer questions simultaneously, instead of going around the room one-by-one,” he says, which can waste time and lead to biased responses. “By getting everyone’s honest input, and not just the extroverts’ or managers’ input, you end up with more informed decisions and results in your meetings,” Russell says.

Getting things done is thwarted by groupthink, shyness, fear, yes-men, extroverts, and dominating managers.

Given what we know about distractions during meetings, it sounds like this could be a tad disruptive to the proceedings. And that is exactly the point. “It’s time for meetings to evolve,” Russell maintains. He cites a variety of findings that indicate that meeting can often be useless and can waste up to $37 billion per year.

Getting things done, says Russell, is thwarted by groupthink, shyness, fear, yes-men, extroverts, and dominating managers. He believes the platform enables people to have fewer, shorter meetings and focus on what is important.