What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Before we get started, I want to share a little update with you all.

For the next little while, we are going to be republishing classic episodes of Founders Journal.

Why? Well, one, I think these past episodes are really good and with so many new listeners

over the last few months, it's very possible you haven't actually heard some of these older

episodes. And two, I am spending the month of May evolving Founders Journal so that we can make

this show as good as humanly possible for the next generation of builders. I would love your help

as I dream up the future of this show, so once you've listened to the episode,

shoot me an email to Alex at Morning Brew.com and tell me what you'd like to see from me.

All right, that's the update, now time for the episode. In today's classic episode,

originally published June 21st, 2021, I offer up six timeless lessons for taking control of meetings

in your professional life. Over the last six years, building Morning Brew, I've been in thousands

of meetings, I've run many of them, I've been an attendee in many of them, and if I'm being honest,

a majority of those meetings have been ineffective or unnecessary. As much as this episode is for you

to level up how you think about meetings, it's just as much to hold me accountable for making

meetings better within my professional world too. So here are six timeless lessons for taking control

of meetings in your professional life. Lesson one, meetings are a last resort, not a first option.

A meeting is a form of communication with the highest opportunity cost of time. The bar should

be super high for when you call a meeting, otherwise you're at risk of wasting time, taking people

out of their productive workflow and not respecting the time of several people. It requires everyone

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