Hello, this is Laverne Cox. I'm an actress, producer and host of the Laverne Cox show.

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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.

Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.

Today's tip is that at the end of any meeting,

you should go through the action steps everyone needs to take before you meet again.

This quick and simple step will increase the likelihood that you make the progress you plan to make between meetings.

So for better or for worse, many professional and volunteer teams rely on meetings to create accountability.

Nobody wants to be sitting across the table from co-workers and acknowledge that they haven't completed the tasks that were assigned to them.

So they generally do the tasks they are supposed to do before the next meeting.

Now, you might argue that colleagues should be accountable to each other even when they are not meeting face-to-face

and that you shouldn't have to waste time sitting in meetings when there's nothing to actually discuss.

And I would totally agree with you.

I truly dislike the inefficiency of having people sit in meetings just to see that,

yep, everyone is still doing their jobs.

But we live in the real world.

And I know that many workplaces have a meeting, heavy culture, where scheduling a meeting is the way you get your tasks to rise to the top of people's priority lists.

So if you do work in such a place, you may as well make the most of this accountability to keep things on track.

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