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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is that if you want to improve your meetings, consider all the meeting dimensions.

Today's tip comes from organizational behavior and meetings expert Rebecca Hines, who was a guest on this podcast a few months ago. She offered some practical

advice for planning better meetings. Rebecca identified four key dimensions of meetings,

length, cadence, attendees, and agenda. With regard to length, she suggested not just scheduling meetings for a half hour or an hour,

because those are the default in your calendar.

Instead, consider how long the meeting actually needs to accomplish your goals.

I would add that if you were in a workplace where people tend to have a lot of

back-to-back meetings, and hence are often running late, or at least need time to transition,

it can be helpful to start your meetings at, say, 10-10, or 140. That is, a few minutes after

people will likely be getting out of their last meetings. That way,

your meetings might actually start on time. The second meeting dimension Rebecca identified was

cadence. Are you meeting more frequently than you need to? If so, stretching out the cadence could free up time

for people to do the tasks that were assigned to them in the last meeting. It is also possible,

though, more rare, that a recurring meeting isn't happening frequently enough. Maybe there tends to be

time with no progress between meetings, because people

are waiting until the next meeting to get guidance on next steps. You want to be sure you're

a meeting as often as you need to, but no more. The third meeting dimension is attendees.

Figure out who actually needs to be in the meeting. Based on who

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