Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing and helping leaders and organizations fully activate their teams, driving both

engagement and performance. So, you know how we keep talking about meetings, like that we're

drowning in them and they aren't super productive and they're sometimes sucking our souls right out through our ears.

But also, even though we keep talking about them, they're not really getting better.

At least, this is what I'm seeing.

I'm spending time with clients who are like, yes, meetings are crushing us,

but we don't know how to break the cycle, so we just keep having meetings.

If this is you or your organization or your team, and chances are it is, then let's talk about some simple changes you can start making in your approach to meetings, and see if we can't carve out just a little extra breathing room for you to enjoy.

First, turn your agenda into objectives. One of the great challenges of meetings is understanding what are we all doing here.

Not like spiritually or existentially, but literally. Like what are we here to get done? I notice that I'm often invited to meetings with an agenda,

you know, like a roadmap for how we'll spend our time together.

But I'm a believer in objectives, like the outcomes we're here to land.

An agenda's more of a run of show.

It'll say we'll spend 15 minutes on updates, 15 minutes

on brainstorming, and 15 minutes summarizing and action planning. You can do the math. That meeting

will be 45 minutes, so it's over when 45 minutes have passed. But objectives are actual

outcomes or intentions. There're things to be done.

Like, we'll select option A or B, or we'll identify a resource to do XYZ.

Or we'll brainstorm a set of possibilities for achieving a particular outcome.

I might schedule a meeting for 60 minutes, but if at the 27-minute mark our objectives are met, guess who's getting

33 minutes of their lives back? Yeah, that's me showing off my math skills. The end of the meeting is

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