In business, time is money, so marketing agency LBi has created an app that calculates the cost of meetings in order to discourage people from wasting endless hours having them.

The Cost Of Meeting App, or Coma, aims to show companies that constant meetings can be extremely wasteful of resources and can sap the life out of employees. The free app allows you to enter the number of attendees in the meeting along with their average hourly rate.

You can choose the currency to be dollars, pounds or euro and then you start the meeting.


As time ticks by, the counter shows the amount of money you could be earning through billable hours. If the costs spiral out of hand (or you have too many people in the meeting), a message appears on the screen which reads: "If you are seeing this message, fire your project manager."

This can become particularly relevant when multiple advertising agencies, media agencies, PR companies and a client come together for a death-by-PowerPoint session. The app was developed by Cedric Devitt, the executive creative director at LBi's New York office, as an entertaining new year initiative for clients, agencies and other businesses.

Chris Clarke, global chief creative officer of LBi, explains: "We need to be creative in real time. This is a fun tool to make people conscious of how much time we waste in meetings. This simple piece of service design highlights the need to get stuff done."

He added: "I'm getting a divorce so I sent it to my lawyer!".

You can download the app, currently only available for the iPhone, from here.