Something You Should Know - How Biological Clocks Control Your Life & Why Most Meetings Are a Waste of Time

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Did you set any New Year’s resolutions? The chances of them sticking for a long time are pretty slim. However, there is something you can do to improve your odds. This episode begins with a strategy to help make life changes really stick. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-years-resolutionspsychology_us_5862d599e4b0d9a59459654c Do you know what your circadian rhythm is? It’s your internal 24-hour clock that controls you in ways you probably never knew. Dr. Emily Manoogian is a post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute (https://inside.salk.edu/fall-2018/emily-manoogian/) and is an expert in chronobiology which is the study of our internal clocks and how they affect us. Emily joins me to explain how these clocks work and how they control your life. Watch her TED talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=20&v=SrBYSinpEtU&feature=emb_logo Getting ice off your windshield in the morning can be a slow process. However there is a fast, safe and effective way to do it. Listen as I explain what it is. http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/defrost-car-windshield Some people like meetings but I suspect more people don’t. Why? Because meetings are often a waste of time. David Grady is a writer and communications expert who created an interesting TED talk on how to save the world from bad meetings (https://bit.ly/37CnJxE) and he joins me to discuss how to get out of meetings you shouldn’t be in – and how to make better the ones you do have to attend.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. them regulates your 24-hour day. So everyone has about a 24-hour period. If you're a little bit longer than that, you're more likely to be a night person. If you're a little bit shorter than that, or even just really close to 24, you're more likely to be a morning person. Also, the fast, safe, and easy way to get ice off your windshield, and why so many meetings are a total waste of your time.

The problem is there's just too many of them and many of them are thoughtless. They don't take into account other people's time and it eats into people's, not just their time, but it really eats into their soul. The more time people waste in meetings, the less engaged they are at work. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

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Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike

Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Now that we're several days into the new year, this is that time when people start to really question whether their New Year's resolutions were such a great idea. The common sighted statistic is that only about 8% of people who make resolutions actually stick with them, which are pretty bad odds, actually. There is a better way to do this, according to the Huffington Post. A resolution is usually a big thing, like giving up sugar or pasta. If you haven't already been making small changes leading

up to this, it's almost impossible. Small incremental lifestyle changes may feel less sexy, but they have a much greater chance of creating real change, according to Dr. Roberta Anding, who is a nutrition professor at Baylor College of Medicine. So if you're trying to stop eating sugar and you went cold turkey, that's going to be hard. But if you start by trying to cut back on how much you put in your morning coffee or eliminating dessert at dinner, these little small successes that lead to more and more success will eventually help you stop eating sugar altogether. And the same thing applies to anything else you're trying to do as a New Year's resolution. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you've heard the term circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythm is your

cycle. You get up in the morning, you go to bed at night, you have a cycle, a schedule, a rhythm. So is that rhythm hardwired into you? What about when your life throws you off that rhythm? What if your body wants to sleep at night, but you work nights? Or what if you're not a morning person, but you have to get up early? Does it do any damage? And can you change your circadian rhythm? Well, here to discuss this fascinating topic is Dr. Emily Mnookian. She's a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, and she is an expert in chronobiology, which is what circadian rhythm is all about.

Hi, Emily. Welcome. Hi. How are you doing? Great. So, I think people have heard the term circadian rhythm or biological clock, but don't necessarily know exactly what it is. I don't know what it is. So what is it? Biological clocks are a huge part of how all living things work. They basically keep everything in the right place at the right time. The term circadian is literally Latin for about a day. So there are different types of rhythms. There are monthly rhythms, there are annual rhythms, but typically we talk about these daily rhythms that have about a 24-hour period. So that's why we talk about circadian rhythms.

And they pretty much control everything from behavior to physiology to even how your DNA is interpreted. And it's really how your body works properly together. Well, but when you say it controls, I like to think that I control my behavior and my thing. So what do you mean it controls it? Because I don't feel like anything else is controlling me other than me. That's a great question. So yes, it is not the end-all be-all. It's more of a coordinating mechanism that's keeping everything in place. So even if you were in a constant environment, say you were put in a cave, which a couple

scientists actually have done a long time ago, and you had no external cues. Your body would still change its physiology over this 24-hour day. So for instance, pretty much anything you'd get tested at the doctor's office has a 24-hour rhythm, and you're not really consciously controlling that. So this is things like your body temperature, your heart rate, your blood pressure. All of these things have a natural oscillation throughout the day, even how glucose is interpreted. So if you're eating sugar in the middle of the day, it's going to be very different than in the middle of the night because your body knows you normally don't eat while you're sleeping.

So it helps release energy sores, and you're not as good at digesting new ones. So it's doing all this kind of coordination to make sure your body's able to be in the state that it needs to be in at a specific time of day. And what dictates that? We actually have these molecular clocks. So each cell has a set of molecules that actually are this really cool feedback loop that keep about a 24-hour time. Now, as cool as that is, none of that would matter, except that those molecules also then impact over 50% of the rest of your DNA and how genes are transcribed and how proteins are used.

And so it's really controlling the timing of everything at a cellular level. And then we also have a master clock in our brain that is able to coordinate all those clocks throughout the body. Now, again, this system would totally work completely normally and great if you're in a constant environment, but we're not. We live in a world that has a 24-hour period. So we also take in cues such as light and food, and those talk to both the clock in your brain and those other clocks throughout your body to tell it what time of day it is externally, so we can coordinate with our environment as well. Can I change those things? It seems to me I can change some of those things. For example, I used to be more of a night person because I used to work nights, and now I'm more of a morning person, and it's only because I don't work nights anymore. So it seems like these things are adaptable.

To a certain extent, yes. Everyone has what we call a chronotype, which is a technical term for saying how your internal rhythms interact with the environment. So some people are naturally more morning people. Some people are naturally more night people. We know there are a few mutations in that core molecular clock that can cause you to be an extreme morning person or an extreme late person. And those people have a very hard time adjusting

to what we would consider kind of the normal 9 to 5 schedule. But we do have a little bit of wiggle room. So everyone has about a 24-hour period. If you're a little bit longer than that, you're more likely to be a night person. If you're a little bit shorter than that, or even just really close to 24, you're more likely to be a morning person. And evidence has shown that it actually changes throughout your lifespan. So you're a little bit earlier when you're very young. By the time you're hitting puberty, you start to become a little bit more of a night owl.

This is why middle school, high school students have a hard time waking up for early school start times. And then in the early to late 20s, depending, females shift back a little sooner, you become a little bit more of a morning person, and you can kind of stabilize there. But you're right, you can absolutely adapt a little bit. So depending on what your schedule is and those external cues that you're feeding your body, if you're saying,

this is the time we get light, this is the time we eat, and you keep a pretty regular schedule, you're not actually changing your internal clocks. You're just shifting when you would be awake a little bit based on the cues you're giving your body. So there's a little bit of room for that. But something like a full night shift adjustment is usually too much for someone to shift to, because you usually can't get enough light, or your food doesn't usually come at normal times. And so that can be really challenging. So you can shift a little bit, but not quite as much as we usually like to. So when people work in jobs,

you know, firemen or I know policemen will sometimes they'll work the day shift and then every few months they get switched to nights or whatever, that's got to wreak havoc. It does. In fact, shift work is listed as a carcinogen at the World Health Organization. What? Yeah. Nurses have one of the highest rates of breast cancer. Cancer is found in higher rates of shift workers in general.

They have elevated levels of inflammation. We know shift work is a huge challenge on the body. We actually have an ongoing study right now working with 24-hour shift working firefighters as a way to try to be able to understand what's going on with them and also create an intervention to help them. So what we're focusing on is the timing of when they eat, because we can't change when they get light, we can't change when they get a call or when they get to sleep, but we can change when they eat. And so we know that these firefighters are starting very healthy, very fit, but they have early onset of cardiometabolic diseases, like diabetes, high blood pressure, and they also have higher incidence of cancer,

which is also confounded by the line of work. But erratic eating across the night, across the day, can also lead to a lot of these factors. So what we're doing is what we call time-restricted eating as a way of condensing their eating window to a consistent 10-hour window to allow their body to get that proper rest, at least within the metabolic kind of patterns. Did the electric light just screw up everything?

Because before that, people pretty much had to live by the sun, so they would sleep at night, they'd get up when it was daylight, and, you know, that was it. It's very hard to function much at night. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. The light and the industrial revolution where we could work 24 hours a day to, you know, increase productivity really kind of set us on a bad path. In fact, there was a really cool study done by Ken Wright's group at University of Colorado that found the best way to kind of reset your clocks, kind of find out what your natural timing normally is, is to go camping for a week and only have firelight at night. So you can have

devices during the day, but once the sun goes down, no artificial light, only firelight. And that was the best thing you could do for it. So yes, I think a lot of times we're making life a lot harder for ourselves than it needs to be with all of these new things that seem to make it so much easier. We're looking at screens. Any time of day, we have access to food 24-7. And a lot of restaurants even encourage these really late-night eating things. You can even have it delivered to your house while you're binge-watching shows, right? And that's giving all the wrong cues to your body. And what's the long-term effect? If I, for a year, am working overnight and eating horribly and eating at 3 o'clock in the morning,

and then that stops, does everything get fixed and go back to normal? Or have I done some permanent damage? Depends on your age. And honestly, no one's just tested it for one year. Unfortunately, shift work is usually a long term thing. But we do see this naturally occurring. I mean, just look at students in college. They pretty much circadianly disrupt themselves as much as they possibly can. I remember when I was in college during finals, the cafeteria would be open until 2 a.m. and you're eating kind of around the clock and pulling all-nighters and you're kind of doing it to yourself. And so a lot of us go through a lot of circadian disruption without realizing it. You don't have to be a shift worker to disrupt your biological

clocks. So things like staying up really late and binge drinking or even just having a lot of late night snacks on a weekend and then shifting back to your morning schedule, like on Monday, that's known as social jet lag. We see this a lot in students. We see this a lot in adults. Even just traveling frequently and changing time zones. We do this a lot in adults. You know, even just traveling frequently and changing time zones. We do this very frequently. When we look at animal models within a lab, that type of circadian disruption compromises almost every aspect of health. Pretty much anything you would be naturally susceptible to, you're weakened because the

body's not able to process things properly. I think metabolism is one really good way to look at it. So for instance, as I said earlier, you're not able to process glucose properly during the night because your body's not releasing insulin during the night. It's releasing glucagon. So you can tap into stored energy sources that you already have. But if you're constantly taking in calories, you never actually get to tap into stored energy sources that you already have. But if you're constantly taking in calories, you never actually get to tap into those energy stores. So you'll never burn fat. So you can build up fat over time.

You're never going to get this natural fast that you need to be able to do that. Eating is also an arousal cue. So you might fall asleep, but the sleep that you get won't be as high a quality of a sleep. And we know sleep also has widespread effects on the body. So I kind of see it as it's not like you broke a bone and it's an instant, acute, you feel the pain. Although sometimes with jet lag, you do feel it. It's more of a constant wearing down. It's like never changing the oil in your car and thinking the

engine's going to run great forever. We're talking about your biological clock, your circadian rhythms, and we're speaking with Dr. Emily Mnookian, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to something you should know are curious about the world,

looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI,

discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker, John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. That's pretty cool. of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Emily, I know people who I've met in my career who've worked overnights or worked late nights and claim to have loved it. I would much rather do, I'd rather work overnights because people aren't around to bother me. My boss is asleep, and I don't have to worry about it. Do they really love it, or are there some people who actually thrive counter to everything you're saying, or it's all artificial? You know, some of it comes back to their chronotype.

So, for instance, early morning people usually do better on these really early shifts, that, you know, maybe it's a 5 a.m. start. They might feel great on that schedule, whereas for me, as a little bit of a late person, I could not handle that. That would kill me. And same thing with late nights. If you're a real night owl, then being able to stay up and sleep in might actually be

a lot easier on you than being forced to wake up much earlier than your body would want to. So some people are definitely more suited for certain schedules than others. That being said, the social impact also has a big component here. If you have a family or someone you need to take care of at certain times of day and you're working at night and then when you get home you need to take care of them during the day or you have social requirements, whatever it may be, you never really get to fully shift. So a lot of people maybe, you know, theoretically if I put them in a lab I could get them to shift to a night schedule and they would feel fine because it would

be consistent, they wouldn't have anything else pulling them. What we frequently find is when you're on these really late-night shifts or very early morning shifts, you still end up staying up when you would, even if you weren't on those kind of more intense schedules for social reasons. And so that ends up compromising your sleep. It's also much harder to sleep during the day. Again, your biological clocks help tell you when to sleep and consolidate your sleep. And so even if you have time available,

you aren't usually able to take advantage of it. And when you do that, when you mess up with this clock that's in your body, like you said, you could gain weight or you could have trouble sleeping or what, but are there real long-term effects? You said something like shift work is a carcinogen. I mean, it sounds like it could kill you. Yes. So we know that circadian disruption can lead to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, cancers. It increases inflammation in the body, which is generally a risk factor for most diseases.

In fact, obesity is even an inflammatory disease, as is cancer, those types of things. In fact, in studies where people are isolated and studied for longer periods of time, if you or any member of your family has ever had depression or bipolar, you're not allowed to participate because it's so likely to trigger an episode, even if you've never had that in your life. Well, jet lag is an interesting thing to me, because even just going to a time zone that's two hours away seems to screw you up. And it seems like the body should be able to adjust for that. Because it's not that, I'm not going to London where it's 12 hours away or 11 hours away. It's just two hours away. Why is it still hard for the body to adjust? And why is it harder when you go one way and not the other? It takes about a day for

every hour that you switch for your body to adjust. So if you're traveling two hours, you know, changing your time zone by two hours, it's going to take you somewhere between one to three days to adjust to that new time. And if you're changing your schedule on that, that could be exacerbated. So I know sometimes maybe I'm flying to the East Coast for a conference and it's a three-hour change, but I also have to wake up an hour earlier than I normally would because the conference starts earlier than my normal work day. Now that's really a four-hour shift, you know, so it can be exacerbated by your schedule as well. So that's part of it. It also depends when you're traveling. So if you're traveling, you know, really late at night or in the morning, depending on, you know, if you're changing your eating

schedule with that as well and you end up eating really late, that can even kind of sometimes trigger you if you're not used to doing that. And you're right, it's easier to travel west than it is to travel east. And if you think of it as, you know, you're delaying your biological clock cycle versus you're advancing it, it's a lot easier to put pause on a system than it is to say, we're two hours behind already. Are any of those hacks that people you've heard of, you know, well, set your watch to your destination the day before or get on the schedule of where you're going or, I don't know, hydrate or any of those things ever been proven to be helpful or they're just guesses? I think they're good educated guesses. So for instance, changing your time zone ahead

of time, like trying to shift a few days ahead, say you're going to the East Coast and so three days ahead of time, you wake up an hour earlier each day, that might give your body a little bit of a heads up to be able to be on that new time zone. Some people also use melatonin to adjust to the new schedule, which is both controlled by and feedbacks on the molecular clocks in your brain, so that some people report that. That can be helpful, and I think there's probably some good logic for that, especially based off of studies with individuals who are blind. They can use melatonin to kind of coordinate with their environment when they can't take in light cues. So there's some logic for that, but I think

there is some evidence, but not directly tested. There has been quite a bit of talk lately in the news about this intermittent fasting, and I know you have some expertise in that. So what is this all about? What does it do? How do we know it works or doesn't work or what? There's a lot of really cool science here. Time-restricted eating is picking somewhere between an 8- to 12-hour eating window that is consistent every day. So in our studies, we do a 10-hour eating window. So that means, say you start eating at 8 a.m.

or drinking anything that isn't eating at 8 a.m. or drinking anything that isn't water at 8 a.m., the last thing you should consume is at 6 p.m. And the exact times of that will depend on your schedule. So that's just an example. And it needs to be that same window every day. And when you do that, the studies say what happens? So we actually just had a study published in Cell Metabolism a few weeks ago showing that individuals that have metabolic syndrome who are at high risk for their pre-diabetic and high risk for cardiovascular disease, that if you put them on that 10-hour eating window without changing any other food, you know, not telling them to change what they're

eating or when they're exercising, they lost about 5% of their weight. Their blood pressure went down significantly. They also decreased blood glucose as well and LDL cholesterol. So we're seeing both metabolic and cardiovascular benefits by just changing the timing of when you eat, even if you're not changing what you're eating. Yeah. Of course, that's not always practical to do, to stop eating at 6 o'clock at night and not eat another bite again until 8 o'clock the next morning. Absolutely.

Same way, you know, you're going to have cake occasionally. You're going to have probably more drinks than you should occasionally. It's okay to have a cheat day. In fact, we think probably about once a week to cheat a little bit later is not a big deal, but it's kind of like brushing your teeth. If you never brush your teeth because you don't think it matters, your teeth are probably going to rot. If you forget to brush your teeth once a week, you're probably going to be okay. So we think it's really more that timing really is an important cue for when you're eating and for how your body interprets food, really, and what it does to your circadian system. So trying to be consistent as you can with it, you know, a majority of the time,

we think would have some benefits for you. Even if you are going to cheat occasionally, allowing your body to get that daily rest is really important. And this is similar to intermittent fasting, which is allowing for these more robust fasts to allow your body to tap into current fuel storage and not be overfilled with nutrients. Some of the two real main differences are that time-restricted eating requires a consistent eating window.

It shouldn't shift. And that it also doesn't require calorie restriction. Most forms of intermittent fasting require at least temporary calorie restriction, and time-restricted eating does not. Well, I and everybody else now knows a lot more about my circadian rhythms and biological clocks than I ever knew before. Dr. Emily Mnookian has been my guest. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute and an expert in chronobiology. Thanks, Emily. Yeah, thank you so much. Hey, everyone, join me, Megan Rinks,

and me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday,

Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. I've never been a big meeting guy. I know some people like meetings,

but I bet more of us dread them than like them, and probably for the same reasons. Not much gets accomplished, a lot of time gets wasted, people are often late, I have little, if anything, to contribute, there doesn't seem to be a clear objective, and on and on. However, I also understand that sometimes meetings are necessary. But it would seem that if you're going to have a meeting,

it should be productive, worthwhile, the right people should be there, there should be a goal, and that goal should be achieved. Here to discuss why that so seldom happens, and how to make meetings a lot better, is David Grady. He is a writer and longtime communications expert who has a TED Talk online about how to save the world from bad meetings. Hi David, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. So how do you see this problem? What's wrong with meetings?

The problem is there's just too many of them and many of them are thoughtless. They're put together in a way that doesn't really have an objective or an agenda. They don't take into account other people's time. They're really thoughtlessly put together is the big issue. And it eats into people's, not just their time, but it really eats into their soul. The more time people waste in meetings, the less engaged they are at work. How do we know that? Well, there's been a lot of studies, both about the financial impact and the emotional impact. I work with a number of organizations that do this full time. They go into organizations and help them. And sometimes I consult with these companies and these organizations to go in and they help companies redesign the way that they meet.

But we know that billions and billions of dollars are lost every year in productivity. But I think more importantly is the emotional toll that spending 20, 30 hours a week in meetings when you could be back at your desk actually doing your job. That emotional toll is really, really heavy. And it really does take like a physical and emotional mental toll on people. And eventually they're going to burn out. They're going to burn out faster. And they're going to leave their jobs. And retaining people is so important.

My observation is that there are some people that are like meeting people. They'll go to meetings and they thrive on that. And then there are people like me who avoid them like the plague. And the reason that I don't like meetings is that it seems that in a meeting, it takes an hour to discuss something that if it was just two people talking would take 10 minutes. Couldn't agree more. And then that really is an issue that there are people who love to host meetings and there are people who love to go to meetings.

So there are people who love to host meetings because they want to feel that they're at the center of the room, that they are showing to the rest of the organization in a visible way that they are leaders, that they're trying to be leaders. When in reality, if they're creating so many meeting invitations that other people are not being able to do their job, they're not leading at all. They're actually pulling the organization down. So the people who love meetings for the sake of meetings, it's a short-term win. They think, oh, look at him. He's hosting a meeting. Look at her. She's in charge of that big meeting in there that must be important. She must be important. He must be important. But the long-term is that if they are enabling a culture that allows time to be wasted, and really, quite honestly, other resources to be wasted too, it costs a lot of money to pay people to sit there and pretend not to be looking at their phones.

That's a real short-term win. And that's a real issue in organizations too is if we go to so many meetings, we're very rarely present. If you spend four or five hours a day in meetings, your mind is somewhere else. So you might be sitting there and maybe trying to sneak a look at your phone. Maybe they catch you or maybe they don't mind, or maybe you're just sitting there and you're pretending to listen and you're not really paying attention. So you're only half doing the work that you want to be doing and you're only half doing the work that you should be doing in this meeting. And it really comes down to, as you said, there are two types of people. You said that there are people who like to host meetings,

but there are people who love to go to meetings. And that's the other folks who want to also be seen as I'm part of the important gang. But the truth of the matter is the smart people, the people who are seen as managing their time in a proactive way, they're the ones who kind of show up like rock stars. They don't always go to every last meeting, right? And when they do show up, they're noticed because they add something to it, they contribute to the conversation, they add value to the organization, but they don't go and they don't just sit there for an hour hoping they were donuts, looking at their phone and then leaving and not really adding anything. Quite honestly, less is more when it comes to meetings.

I always wonder about the people who think that everything requires a meeting. Because why? What's that thought process that when there's a problem, let's get 25 people together to discuss it, when really it's probably going to take one or two people, fix the problem, and get on with the day? Well, there's a couple of things going on there. It really is a habit to pull together a meeting and just call a meeting. There's always been meetings. And the calendar helps you do that. Most calendars default to one hour. So you call a meeting for 25 people to talk about a thing that could take 10 minutes, but the calendar defaults to 60.

So how much of that time do you really need? And then they all show up and you say, I'm going to let you go. I'm going to give you 15 minutes back because this 10 minuteminute meeting went 45 minutes. It's insanity. But the other thing is that it could be an email. Well, we all get so many emails. And the customers, the clients, the companies that I've talked to as a consultant looking at their issues around this, they say that in addition to the meetings, they're drowning in email. So you really can't win. So is it more about the drive-by meeting? Is it more about the stand-up meeting? There's a lot of research and a lot of thought about this. For me, it's not, you can't fix this in one way. All organizations are different. The only thing you can control as a worker is your time. So what I tell people to do is, sure, you might get 100 invitations to a

meeting this week, right? And that's one every 35 minutes or something. It's up to you to decide which ones you want to go to and need to go to. Now that sounds luxurious and not everybody can do that. When the big boss sends a meeting invitation, of course you're going to go. But I just recommend people ask themselves and ask the person who sent the invitation to them, why do you want me there? What can I do to prepare for this? What value do you expect me to add to it? What will we take away from this? Why are six people from my team invited to this meeting? We all make $40 an hour. That's a lot of money for that one hour.

Can you pick one person from our team to represent all of us and they could read out to us? It doesn't take a lot of thought to be thoughtful when it comes to either preparing a meeting, but particularly it doesn't take a lot of thought to be thoughtful about accepting a meeting or denying or declining a meeting. So let's start with what requires a meeting. Where is the line between, okay, this is going to take a meeting and this is just going to take a quick memo or a phone call or a, hey, Bob, fix the thing. So I think when you put it in the context of, say, a project, right? So a project has a life cycle. Where are you in the life cycle of this project? Are you at the beginning where you need a meeting to solicit input from all these stakeholders?

And do you need to get the right information from the right people so then you can go off and do your work? Do you need a meeting to make decisions or to winnow down a number of recommendations to a couple of decisions that need to be made? Or do you make that decision in the room? But to do the work in the room every Tuesday at two from two to three, because we've just been meeting like that for years. And there are organizations that have had recurring meetings literally for years. That is not a very good way to obviously use your time. You should have a meeting when there's a clear actionable step to be taken at the end of the meeting, or there's a clear

objective that the meeting organizer goes in there with. They need X, and they're going to leave the room with X. But if everybody just goes in because, hey, there are donuts, that's not the best meeting. Yeah, well, how many organizations have a Monday morning meeting? I mean, just because it's Monday, it's the morning, and it's time to meet with no clear idea of why or what we're going to talk about. It's just that we have that Monday morning meeting. Yeah, you know, in my TED Talk, I talked about this. I said that if you came into your office on a Monday morning and someone walked into your cubicle or your office and they just took your chair and they didn't tell you why, they just walked away with your chair, you'd be outraged.

You'd say, what the heck are you doing with my chair? I need that chair. I can't work with your chair. You'd be outraged. You'd say, what the heck are you doing with my chair? I need that chair. I can't work without that chair. But when someone sends you a two-hour meeting invitation that really doesn't have a purpose or an agenda or really any idea why you're going to it, you just kind of click on it and say, sure, I'll be there because it's a meeting and maybe they're kind of important or they're more senior or something. It's the same thing.

Your chair, your time, the company's money, they're all resources, assets that need to be protected. And you have an obligation to do that. So you wouldn't let him take your chair. You shouldn't let him steal your time. Let's talk about how to run a meeting so it just doesn't go on and on. And that's my peeve is that I've been in meetings where we nailed it in the first five minutes, but people are still talking. We're done, but the meeting is still going on for reasons that are not clear to me. Well, there's a lot of read the room or inability to read the room, right? And sometimes there's

too much deference. Sometimes there's too much deference to somebody who's more senior in the organization. But if you're in a leadership position, you may not be the manager, you may not be the big boss. But if you are in a meeting, and you're running the meeting, you have an obligation and an opportunity to really be in control of that room, people are looking for you to take control of that room. So even if you're the least senior person, even the most junior person in there, but you're running that meeting, that's your time. And that's their time. And you can flex your muscles and say, folks, I got what we need. Let's all get back. I'm sure we'd love to get some more time to ourselves. Why do you think this is not as apparent to so many people as it is to you and to me and to many people who hate meetings? But why are so many people holding the, they must think this is a great idea.

Let's have a meeting. How come they don't get it? You know, when I did this YouTube video a few years ago, I sort of play acted out a conference call, which was ridiculous. On the conference call, everybody was joining late. They started all over again. People didn't know why they were there. They were dialing into the wrong thing.

And that video was about five or six minutes long, but it really touched a nerve. And I'll tell you how, because when I read the comments that people wrote alongside the YouTube video people were saying this is my life every day this is my oh my god this is my day every day this is I showed this video to my wife or my husband so they know what it's like working every day one person saw the video that I put out on YouTube about frankly stupid meetings and they wrote this is my life every day until retirement or death. So I think that there's a sort of a feeling of helplessness and powerlessness that we have to meet. We have to meet because that's what companies do.

But that's not really true. You have to collaborate. And collaboration doesn't just mean having a meeting. Collaboration means walking over to across the floor, poking your head into someone's office or someone's cubicle, or saying, let's take a walk around the building. It's a warm day. I want to run an idea by you, right? You don't need to bring 22 people into a room to run an idea by them. Walk around the building with them. There are great talks about that as well. But I think it's kind of a reflex just to jump on and calendarize a meeting and get everybody together. And we've got to break it. And if the person who does the inviting is not going to break that cycle,

then it's the person who's invited is going to break that cycle. They have to know when to say no. They have to know when to say maybe. They have to know when to ask why. Why am I going to this? And when you ask why, if, say, the person who commented on your video about this is my life until the day I die, what should he be asking? What should he do to stop this? Because he asks what questions?

What I urge people to do is to respectfully ask, what do you want from me at this meeting? What's my role in this meeting? Am I an advisor? Am I an expert? Am I taking notes? Am I there to fill a seat? I want to know what my role is, if you can tell me. Can you tell me what the objective is so I can prepare for this meeting? You don't have to put hours and hours and hours into preparing for a one-hour meeting, but if you could put a few minutes into going in ready, everybody can save time because you know why you're there, you know what's expected of you, you know what they're going to talk about.

I would venture a bet that most people get invitations to meetings on their calendar systems, on their computers, and there's no detail at all. Maybe the subject line says Project X meeting, but it doesn't say Project X meeting to discuss milestone one and the decision on the budget. If I at least had that little kernel of information before I accepted it or declined the meeting, I could say, wow, five other people from my department are going to this.

You know what? I'm going to work on that other thing and let those two people go and advise the other three not to go. So it's just, it's a mystery that is habit. It's, I don't know why people do it. And again, it's on you, the individual, I think, to change your behavior. You're never going to change anybody else's. So as we've discussed, there are basically two kinds of people. People who don't like meetings and find them to be a big waste of time, and people who like meetings, who go to meetings, who call meetings.

Why do these two types of people have such different perceptions of meetings? There must be some other agenda for the people who like meetings to call the meetings. So I think a meeting to some degree is a safety blanket that people call because they want to be able to say, well, I talked to John and I talked to Mary and I talked to Fred and I talked to Sue and we all agree that, well, no, you know what? You didn't need an hour to do that. You can collect that sort of input from stakeholders from many different ways.

You can do your work, then you can go see your manager and say, I got input from folks and here's my recommendation. And they'll be glad because you're doing your job. You're being a leader as opposed to following. And if you're leading a meeting, that's a waste of an hour. You're not leading. When I think back on when I worked for larger organizations, a lot of the meetings that I went to weren't really meetings in the sense that we were going to be discussing much. We went to these meetings because we were being told what to do. It was more of a presentation of, here's a change we're going to make, and here's how it's going to

affect you. It wasn't really a, yeah, I guess we could ask questions at the end kind of thing, but it wasn't a meeting meeting. It was a, here's how we're going to do things. And if this is how we're going to do things, why can't you just write that down? Or, you know, why do we all have to waste our time listening to this boring presentation about how we're going to do this?

Yeah. I mean, internal communications folks have a real challenge on their hands because they need to be able to say that they've consistently contacted and informed everybody in the organization. So to have that sort of mandatory meeting where you get 100 people into the room is a way for them to at least, maybe it could even be a compliance thing to say that we did notify everybody and we did it, we did a check. You send out an email about an important policy change and only 80% of it read it. Maybe there could be an issue there.

But what I'm really more concerned about is the recurring meeting, right? So the recurring meeting is one that somebody schedules from 11 a.m. to noon or 12.15 or something like that for 52 weeks. And it's about Project X. And it's unbelievable because I've been in many large organizations where this happens and it gets auto-renewed after a year and you're still going. And maybe it's about project X. And it's unbelievable because I've been in many large organizations where this happens and it gets auto-renewed after a year and you're still going. And maybe it's morphed into project Y or project Z, but people are still meeting. And they refer to it in the hallways. I'll talk to you on the Thursday meeting. I'll talk to you on the Thursday meeting. And it becomes sort of this runaway train. Those meetings really shouldn't be meetings. And there are many books about this, or I've seen coffee cups that say another meeting

that could have been an email. What does a good meeting look like? I don't know. There's lots of different kinds of meetings. But in general, what's the plan? When we have a meeting, what should we be doing? So the meeting organizer, I think, should put out an agenda, even if it's high level, even if it's just a few bullet points.

You have to give some clues as to why this meeting is going to be called, what's going to be the main area of focus, and possibly what the desired outcome is. At the end of this meeting, I'm hoping that X. I'm hoping that we can walk away in agreement with. I'm hoping that we can leave the room with assignments to go get more information that we need. I'm hoping that we will all leave the meeting ready to tell our other employees, you know, some news and share some news. So if you can articulate some sort of an objective in your meeting invitation, that's great. If you have the right representation, it needs to be thoughtful about representation. As I said earlier, you don't want to invite six

people from the same department. You know, would you ever take six people out to lunch on the company credit card without permission? I mean, that's an expensive lunch, right? And if it's a two-hour lunch, you wouldn't do that because now you're on the clock and you're spending a lot of money and you're going to the best steakhouse, right? You would never do that. But you wouldn't ask for permission to take, you know, an entire department into a meeting for two hours that maybe isn't very well structured. So it looks lean. It looks well represented. It looks organized in that it has an objective and it has some points. It gives you a little bit of preparation time beforehand. But the person who puts this together doesn't have to spend hours to save one hour.

The person just puts a little bit of thought into it and communicates. I don't want to walk into a blind situation. Nobody wants to walk into a scary situation they don't know what it's going to be about. And it is scary if you walk into a meeting and you have no idea why you're going to be there. You can freeze up younger people or people who are newer to the workforce. They can sort of be deer in the headlights because they're in the room with these more senior people. If you give them a little bit of a hint, they can really surprise you and bring some good stuff to the table. Well, this has been some valuable advice, especially for people like me who don't like meetings. Now we have some guidance on how to speed them up, quicken them up and make them a little more worthwhile. So I appreciate

that. My guest has been David Grady. He is a writer and longtime communications expert, and he has a TED Talk about how to save the world from bad meetings. And you will find a link to that TED Talk in the show notes. There are a few ways to get ice off of a windshield, but none of them are very speedy. You can turn on the defroster or use an ice scraper, but those take a long time. Some people try to melt the ice by pouring hot water on their windshield. That's a really bad idea because it can crack the windshield. The best fast and easy solution is to mix two parts of rubbing alcohol with one part water, then pour it in a spray

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