1156: How to Make Great Meetings that Stop Wasting Time with Rebecca Hinds

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

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4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2026

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rebecca Hinds discusses the simple shifts that turn meetings from time-wasters into value-generators.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) Why most meetings don’t feel like “real work”

2) Why every organization needs a “meeting doomsday”

3) The easy agenda fixes that save so much time

Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep1156 for clickable versions of the links below.

— ABOUT REBECCA —

Rebecca Hinds is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Rebecca founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, first-of-their-kind corporate think tanks dedicated to conducting cutting-edge research on the future of work.

She is a trusted advisor to companies navigating the challenges of modern work—from meeting overload and hybrid dysfunction to the messy realities of AI adoption and organizational change.

• Book: Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done

• LinkedIn: Rebecca Hinds

• Website: RebeccaHinds.com

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• Tool: Glean

• Book: Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant

• Book: Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao

• Book: The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao

• Past episode: 492: Making Meetings Work with J. Elise Keith

• Past episode: 684: Achieving More by Tapping into the Science of Less with Leidy Klotz

— THANK YOU SPONSORS! —

• Scribe. Book a personalized enterprise demo with scribe.how/awesome

• Narwhal. Treat your home to spotless, fresh floors with us.narwhal.com/pete.

• Monarch.com. Get 50% off your first year on with the code AWESOME.

• Shopify. Sign up for your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/awesomepod

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You'll hear people talk about meetings as if they're not the real work.
0:13.9	If we design meetings correctly, they should be the real work.
0:17.5	They should move work forward.
0:19.4	So often, it's not the case, because they're used performatively. They're move work forward so often it's not the case because they're used
0:22.3	performatively. They're used as a box checking exercise and not a product that moves our work
0:27.3	forward. You can take any dysfunctional meeting or any meeting that you know isn't fully optimized
0:34.1	and pick one dimension, cut it in half. Take that 30-minute meeting, try to run it for just 15 minutes.
0:40.8	Take that six-person meeting. What if it's three people?
0:48.3	That's Rebecca Hines. She's an expert on organizational behavior who advises companies on the challenges of the modern workplace, such as meeting overload and the messy realities of AI adoption.
0:59.4	Rebecca is also the author of the best-selling book, Your Best Meeting Ever, Seven Principles for Designing Meetings that Get Things Done.
1:05.3	So you'll learn one, why most meetings don't feel like real work. Two, why every organization needs a meeting doomsday.
1:12.9	And three, the easy agenda fixes that saves so much time.
1:17.1	And if you want a quick summary write about the actionable wisdom that Rebecca shares,
1:20.0	you can find that over at Awesome at Your Job.com
1:22.6	with the Gold Nugget email newsletter, totally free and super cool.
1:27.0	I'm Pete McItis.
1:27.9	This is How to Be Awesome at your job.
1:29.2	And now, here's Rebecca.
1:35.3	Rebecca, welcome.
1:36.6	Thank you so much for having me, Pete.
1:38.0	I'm looking forward to chatting.
1:39.5	Oh, me too, me too.
	...

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