This is an I-Heart podcast.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the new corner office, the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the new world of work, where location and hours are more flexible than in the

past. Today's tip is to be strategic about your meetings. By understanding exactly when they'll be

happening, you can be better prepared, manage your energy, and figure out what times you can do

non-meeting work to.

Collaboration is amazing in theory. None of us has all the answers.

In practice, though, what it means is that most jobs and big organizations involve a lot of meetings.

This tendency to schedule meetings about everything is exacerbated in a world

where lots of people are working from home. You can't see your colleague to casually ask for his

feedback on your proposal. So you schedule a formal meeting to get his feedback, and thus,

meetings proliferate. Some of that is inevitable, but by being a bit more mindful and

strategic, you can manage your meetings better. Here's what you do. By the time you start work on

Monday morning, take a good look at your calendar for the week. When do you have meetings? Some are no doubt weekly recurring sorts and some are one-off

types. Figure out how many hours you currently have booked into meetings. Then do a little

triage. Do all these meetings have to happen? We've talked in previous episodes about seeing what can be

canceled. Ask for agendas for anything

that seems iffy. Anything that is a one-on-one check-in might be better approached as a quick phone

call. So go ahead and make that call. The goal is to reduce the overall meeting load.

Then, once you're clear on what's staying, figure out what you need to prepare for.

When people get busy, they just start tromping from one thing to the next, like middle schoolers changing classes.

Here's my 2 o'clock, my 3 o'clock, my 4 o'clock.

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