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Next time you’re stuck in that time suck of a four-hour Monday staff meeting, texting on your iPhone, checking e-mail or reading this Business Record article to pass the time, think again – you might feel as if someone’s watching you. And no, it won’t be the wad of cash with googly eyes from GEICO, but it will show you the money you could be saving with Bring TIM!

It’s no secret that meetings, even at well-run companies, can get out of hand and off track in a hurry. Brad Johnson, a former Des Moines resident and current employee benefits adviser, was tired of wasting his time in painfully unproductive four-hour meetings. So the first-time inventor went to work and spent more than three years developing “Bring TIM! – Time Is Money,” a time-management cost calculator that’s designed to show meeting attendees just how much their collective time costs. So, if you are having another meeting about a meeting, Johnson playfully says, “Bring TIM!”

“At first I thought it would be humorous just to have something that in a lighthearted way would say, ‘You know, folks; let’s stay on track,'” said Johnson who began selling the devices for about $25 nearly two months ago. “Often topics come up in meetings and you just wonder why are 20 of us debating what flavor cake to have at the party.”

OK, so wasting time at a meeting can be a funny thing, but it’s also costly.

How costly? Let’s have Bring TIM! help us out. We’ll have a staff meeting, where the average hourly compensation of the 30 participating employees is $30. When you start the meeting, you plug that information into the device and press start. The timer on Bring TIM! begins, and the device in real time – like a taxi meter – shows how much the meeting has cost up to that point. In our example, after our two-hour meeting, the total cost is $1,800. Good thing we compromised on a delicious chocolate/yellow swirl cake.

There are approximately 11 million meetings held every day in the United States, according to a National Statistics Council study, and those meetings take up about 37 percent of employees’ days. What’s worse is that according to the Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge, a survey of 38,000 people in 200 countries, 71 percent of U.S. workers believe that their meetings are unproductive.

Johnson felt there weren’t a lot of easy solutions out there for unproductive meetings, but is quick to point out he doesn’t want Bring TIM! to be viewed as a completely serious business tool. Johnson said he can see people giving it as a gift, or as a friendly prodding to a boss. But he says, just the little reminder of the cost of a meeting can go a long way.

“It is introduced as kind of a fun, lighthearted thing, but my hope is that it does add some value and serve as a conversation piece,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, it is effective at getting people to realize, ‘Hey, you know what? Let’s cut this short.'”

He might not have intended for Bring TIM! to be completely serious, but according to one business that made a purchase, it has made quite a difference. Angela Bagby, director of marketing and client relations for Russell Construction Co., bought the device and couldn’t believe nobody had ever thought of making it before.

Bagby said that when Jim Russell, the company’s CEO, first brought Bring TIM! to a quarterly all-staff meeting, he put it on the table and about 20 minutes into the meeting made an announcement of how the time they had spent translated into money.

“People’s eyebrows kind of went up; it was sort of like a realization of wow, that really is a lot of money,” Bagby said. “It just kind of makes them aware of the value of the dollar and the value of the time.”

The company continues to use Bring TIM! at meetings, and Bagby said the simple constant reminder it provides has helped keep meetings more focused.

“There is no wandering off topic; there is no delaying, no taking phone calls or answering e-mails during the meeting,” she said. “It has just become a very focused way of kind of making sure energy and your conversation are directed where they should go.”

Bagby said she brings the device to many of the board meetings she attends, and that Russell Construction often even uses it during meetings with its clients. So far, she said, nobody has been offended, and she usually fields lots of questions from businesses that are interested in getting one of their own because of its low cost.

“It is affordable, and it is kind of like, why wouldn’t you get one?” Bagby said.

Johnson still has his day job but said he has sold more than 130 units so far to businesses all over the country, despite being based in Bettendorf, because of his Web site.

“Bring TIM! is not the be-all-end-all, but I think it is a step in the right direction,” he said. “And I think so much of it is just having people think, ‘Hey, is this meeting really worth it?'”

Is the one you’re in right now? If our approximately 22,000 readers spend five minutes during a meeting reading this article, Bring TIM! says collectively their time invested was worth $55,000.

But don’t worry; you were only half paying attention, so you probably only cost the company around $1.25. Hope it was worth your while, and that no one was watching.