This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Death by Meeting: The Hidden Cost of Bad Meetings with Dr. Rebecca Hinds | 385

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

If meetings are draining your energy, killing momentum, and stealing your calendar — you’re not imagining it. They’re broken. And they’re costing us trillions. In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, Nicole is joined by Dr. Rebecca Hinds, organizational behavior expert, Stanford PhD, and author of Your Best Meeting Ever, to expose why meetings are one of the most expensive, overlooked products inside any organization — and how to fix them. We get into: Why bad meetings are literally an old-school sabotage tactic (thanks, WWII) The real cost of ineffective meetings — and who pays the highest price The 4D CEO Test for deciding if a meeting should exist at all Why status updates don’t belong in meetings (ever) The science behind why meetings over 8 people stop working How to measure meetings by return on time invested Why you don’t need fewer meetings — you need better ones And how to influence meetings even when you’re not the one in charge This conversation is part wake-up call, part permission slip, and part playbook for anyone done pretending “this is just how work works.” Meetings aren’t neutral. They shape culture, power, and whose work gets seen — so if your meetings are broken, your organization is too. The good news? You don’t need more authority to change them — just more intention. Thank you to our sponsors! Sex is a skill. Beducated is where you learn it. Visit https://beducate.me/bg2602-womanswork and use code womanswork for 50% off the annual pass. Connect with Rebecca Website: https://www.rebeccahinds.com/  LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-hinds/  Related Podcast Episodes: Leadership Unblocked (The Hidden Beliefs Sabotaging Your Ability To Lead) with Muriel M. Wilkins | 367 The Sixth Level Of Leadership with Dr. Stacy Feiner | 236 The 3 N’s - Negotiation, Networking & No with Kathryn Valentine | 327 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing woman's work in the world today. From boardrooms to studios, kitchens to coding dens, we are questioning all of our defaults, giving our finger to the shoulds and the supposed tos, and torching the old playbook. You know the one that always starts with, this is just the way it's always been done. We're deciding for ourselves how we spend our time, energy, and attention. And if we hone in on work for today's topic, one of the clearest places we need, need to recalibrate, reassess, and redefine is in our meetings. All of the meetings. Because if there is a

slow, soul-sucking way to undermine ambition, creativity, and momentum, it's death by meeting. Meetings for the sake of meetings. Meetings that could have been emails. Meetings where nothing is decided, everything is discussed, and somehow you leave with more action items than you walked in with, where you become the default note taker, the default executor. while also somehow being interrupted, talked over, or stuck walking that tightrope between not speaking up enough and speaking too much, where either move is judged. Don't even get me started on the leader of said meetings, winging it,

with no agenda, no objective, starting late, ending later, talking the most, listening the least, circling the same point for 45 minutes, and somehow being shocked when nothing gets decided. What's wild is that meetings could be powerful. They could move work forward. They could spark ideas. They could actually make people want to show up and leave better for having been there. But instead, most of us dread them. And women in particular often pay an extra tax in time, visibility, and emotional labor. So we're asking the uncomfortable question. How many of your meetings are actually purposeful, productive, and worth the calendar real estate they occupy? And we're asking, Why have we normalized something so broken as just part of the job? So today we're diving into the topic of meetings,

more importantly how to have good, productive ones that are actually getting things done. Because meetings aren't neutral. They shape culture, power, and whose work gets seen. And today's guest is here to help us stop treating them like an unavoidable evil and start seeing them for what they actually are or could be, one of the most expensive and influential products inside of any organization. Joining us is Dr. Rebecca Hines, a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BSMS and PhD from Stanford University, founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana

and the Work AI Institute at Glein and advises companies navigating everything from meeting overload and hybrid dysfunction to the messy realities of AI adoption. Her research has been featured everywhere from Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, and she's the author of Your Best Meeting Ever, a bold research-backed blueprint for designing meetings that actually get things done. So in the spirit of running a good meeting, let's call this one to order. Rebecca, welcome to the show, and I want to hone in on how you open your book. You talk about a World War to sabotage manual that encouraged people to destroy productivity by leveraging bad meanings. So tell us about that and why does this still seem familiar today?

Wow, that was a great introduction. Nicole, thank you so much. So we feel it. And, you know, I start the book with the simple sabotage manual, which, you know, came out of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. And essentially, it was a guide for people living in enemy territory, ordinary citizens, to inject inefficiencies into the enemy's operations. And one of the tactics that the manual advised ordinary citizens to use was dysfunctional meetings, right? Few things sabotage work, sabotage people,

sabotage our teams more than a dysfunctional meeting. And, you know, it's ironic and unfortunate that this, ancient sabotage tactic has now become business as usual in our everyday life and work. Yeah. It's crazy. And you estimate that it's an approximate $1.4 trillion each year that is lost by ineffective or unproductive meetings. So I want to ask why you think and think isn't the right word because you've researched this. But why are meetings the most expensive, overlooked product inside of an organization and what are some of the ways that they're costing us? Sure, and that calculation was done by my good friend, Elise Keith, and it's enormous,

staggering the cost of meetings within our organization. And as you mentioned, the premise of your best meeting ever is we need to treat meetings as a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. There were decisions get made, culture gets built, where we align and set priorities, and yet they're the least optimized. And it's so staggering to think that every other business process, every other business procedure, we often measure down to the decimal point. And yet meetings, the practice we spend more time in than any other, we so often close our eyes, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. And there are a whole host of psychological reasons why we have so many meetings, fundamentally, it's rooted in the fact that we use meetings as a default

mechanism for all of our problems, all of our uncertainty within the workplace, when really they should be a last resort, not a default reaction. Okay. So this triggers one million questions. I want to make sure that we talk about your seven principles. But how could we or should we measure meanings and what is the actual purpose or how do we get clear on the purpose of a meeting or whether or not we should have one? So there's a whole and each of the seven chapters is rooted in a product design principle because if we're going to treat meetings like the important product they are, we should be applying the same principles that we know make great products great. And one of those principles is systems thinking, right? We need to think about

meetings as part of a bigger communication system, just as Apple, you know, doesn't design the iPhone in isolation, right? It's part of this system that has a feedback loop. Everything has a purpose and is interconnected. And so often we think meetings are the problem, really they're rooted in a bigger problem, and that is a broken communication system. And so it's critical that every organization gives their employees clarity in terms of what is our communication stack, that we're going to use across our organization. And what is the purpose of each tool within that stack? Often I'll go into an organization and employees won't have any sort of clarity

in terms of when do I use Slack? When do I use email? When do I use a meeting? And they need that clarity because meetings will turn into that default reaction. Often they're the most visible way that we show progress within our organization, right? even if we sit in the meeting, at least we've done something and we look productive, we look busy. You know, if we're double booked, it's a symbol of performance and importance within the organization. And so having that clarity is absolutely essential. Okay, I love that you brought

this up because I don't know if I've ever worked with or in an organization where there was clarity on what to use when and how inefficient it is when there's, all these different ways of communicating, like one thing's in my text message and others in my email and others waiting on an agenda. Because you've done this within so many organizations, are there any tips about what to leverage when? When should something be an email? When should Slack be leveraged? When do we call a meeting? And what's, I've done a lot of research on remote organizations and remote first organizations. And this is something that they do really well. Most organizations, there isn't this clarity. In remote first organizations, there needs to be this

clarity because that's how they operate through communication tools and virtual tools. The key is deciding what is the purpose of a meeting. And so in the book, I walk through what I call the 4D CEO test to help you understand, does that meeting, does that meeting, does deserve to be on your calendar. And so it's a two-part test. The first test is the 4D test. A meeting should only exist on the calendar if the purpose is to decide, discuss, debate, or develop yourself or your team. So notice what's not on that list, right? Status updates, not on the list. Broadcast updates, not in the list. But even if a meeting passes that first test, it still needs to pass the CEO test, which is, is the content of the meeting

complex. So if there's a lot of unknown unknowns, probably getting in a room together synchronously in real time is more efficient than say Slack or an email. So that's C. E is it emotionally intense, right? Are we needing to demonstrate emotions? Are we needing to read emotions? Are we delivering harsh feedback or giving a performance review? Probably showing up with our human empathy, our body language is a better move. And then O comes from Amazon. Is it a one-way door decision? Meaning, once we walk through, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse course. And in those cases, probably getting together in a meeting, making sure you're fully aligned is the best bet. And so that helps your employees and your organization at large use meetings strategically.

Right. If it's a status update, it should be sent through email or another asynchronous form of communication. If you're wanting some action, if you're wanting to understand who does what, right? That should be tracked in a project or work management system. If it's a real-time communication that can be asynchronous and doesn't require a decision or a debate or a discussion, use another form of communication and use meetings for that very expensive real-time conversation. I have to imagine when you run it through this and then you actually create meetings that check all of those boxes that people actually enjoy or are more engaged in the meetings they go to anyway, because I just feel like so many people don't want more meetings because the meetings they go to don't

feel valuable. They don't move the needle. And if more meetings felt like what you just described, I mean, I would love to go to any meeting like that. And that's what a great meeting is, right? You walk out of the meeting with this sense of, wow, we could have never come to this outcome or reached this conclusion in a asynchronous form, right? It needed that meeting. It needed that real-time communication and coordination. And that's few and far between and most, organizations right now. And so it's important, too, to think about, you know, probably there are a lot of meetings on all of our calendars where there's portions of those meetings that can be moved asynchronously. And those real-time communication, the communication that passes the four

DCO test, that's what we should be designing our meetings around. Okay. I have questions about who and who not and all these things, but let's first go. into the seven principles of meeting design, just for sake of time, if you could give us either a quick overview or an example of each one, and then I will pepper you with questions. So my favorite one,

and I think the most important one, is the first one. It's around cutting your meeting debt. So if we think about a product, products over time accumulate technical debt, right? There are all of these shortcuts, patches that are put in place, legacy code over time,

The same thing happens to our meetings where we pile on, pile on. We have a whole host of legacy meetings that show up on our calendar. Often there are so many psychological pressures at play where we feel a sense of guilt and regret associated with not showing up or canceling a meeting. And so we end up with calendars that no longer makes sense given our current ways of working. And so a key tactic within this clearing of meeting debt is, what I call a meeting doomsday. And I've run these meeting doomsdays and calendar cleanses and in many organizations and advise many organizations. And what this does, so it's essentially a 48-hour calendar cleanse. You delete your recurring meetings for a period of 48 hours, and then you

rebuild your calendar from scratch. And we've done the comparison, right? How does this compare to the traditional meeting audit where you're evaluating meetings one by one? And what we see, is that complete slate, clean slate, matters a lot in terms of giving employees the permission and the autonomy to rebuild their own calendars without all that baggage, without all of the social contracting that has been put in place where you feel pressure to defend the meetings on your calendar. Now you're giving a pass to redesign your meetings from the ground up. And so that, I think, is a healthy practice for every organization. You know, we're in the beginning of the year, this is the prime time to think about, okay, how do we start fresh and redesign for the current

state of our organization and our work? I have to imagine, too, there's something to not making each individual decision in a silo. Like if I look at any one meeting on its own, you know, I may evaluate that differently than if I look at it in the individual decision. entirety of my day or my week. So I love that. Talk to us about measurement and structure. So structure is a big part of how we design meetings. And so the second principle is around meeting minimalism. Just as the world's best products are minimalist, you can think of Google homepage, right? There's no clutter, no noise, no distraction. You know what you're supposed to do and its purpose built for that task, we should apply that same discipline to meetings.

And so when we think about, I call it becoming a meeting minimalist, it starts by looking at four key dimensions of meetings. So the length, the attendees, the agenda items, and the frequency. And within all of these different dimensions, there are different strategies that we can enact in order to structure and design better meetings. So if we take length, for example, we know that, meetings suffer from what's called Parkinson's Law, meaning work will expand to fill the time allotted. So if we give a meeting 30 minutes, it's probably going to take 30 minutes, 60 minutes, etc. And so thinking very strategically about does that meeting need to be a 30 minute meeting? Can it be a 25 minute meeting or a 15 minute meeting?

I studied an individual who ran 27 minute meetings. And that intentionality does a couple of key things. One, it saves time. But second, it also joltz people out of inertia because they start to realize that, oh, this meeting has been intentionally designed. I haven't just, or the organizer hasn't just defaulted to what Google Calendar Outlook tells me should be a meeting. It's intentionally designed and I'm more likely to show up present in the meeting knowing that is the case. Here's my hot take. What if we all gave the finger to resolutions about losing weight and focused instead on gaining pleasure? This year, instead of another resolution that quietly dies by mid-January, more women are choosing something different. They're having better sex. Beducated is an online platform with over 150 courses on sex and intimacy designed to help women explore pleasure in a safe, private space at their own pace from the comfort of their own bedroom.

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Start now at WealthSimple.com. Okay, and let's talk about attendees because I think this is where things go a little wayward, right? Like you send a calendar invite and you think of all the people who could be there or should be there or whatever. And then, you know, all of a sudden you've got 18 people and 15 of them don't say a word. How do we decide who needs to be in the meeting and how do we iterate? Like if they need to be in this meeting this week, but maybe not every week. It's a critical. It's one of those four dimensions when we think about attendees. So we know that as soon as a meeting gets above eight people, social loafing kicks in. We no longer feel accountable for the outcome of the meeting. We start to see rises in multitasking as well. And so very rarely should you be having meetings with more than eight people in the room. Everyone needs to have a clear rule within the meeting. I talk in the book about the three word test, right? you should be able to describe every attendees role in three simple words.

And if you can't, it's a sign that probably they shouldn't be in the meeting. We need to normalize walking out of a meeting if it's not valuable to us or the people in the room. And so I talk about the law of two feet. Essentially, if the meeting isn't worth your time or you're not contributing to the meeting, use your two feet and walk out of the room. It's staggering how few managers ever talk with their direct reports about, you know, the value of an effective meeting and the value of walking out of a meeting if you're not, you know, contributing or getting value from that meeting. And so we need to start normalizing every person in the room being a stakeholder to the outcome of that meeting rather than a spectator or, as some people call them, meeting tourists who, you know, attend because of fear. missing out or because they think and hope that maybe they'll contribute at some point,

it needs to be strategic in terms of only having dayholders in that meeting. Okay, you talked about length of meetings. What about deciding how frequently we meet? So it's another one of these important dimensions and there are several aspects of frequency that make this especially important. there's the weekly versus monthly versus quarterly, and we need to be thinking intentionally about that. What's interesting is when we do the meeting doomsday,

this is one of the biggest contributors of the time savings is recognizing that a weekly meeting can be every other week or an every other week meeting can be a monthly meeting, right? The time savings pile up very quickly. And I often encourage teams to try to, to extend the frequency in terms of turning a weekly into every other week. And if you're truly not able to align and move work forward and make critical decisions, you can always reverse course and move back the other way to the more frequent cadence. But in almost all cases, teams realize

that they can be meeting less frequently in a way that allows them to move work forward asynchronously. And then another aspects of frequency are these pre-meetings and follow-up post-meeting after the meeting, right? Those are just as dangerous. And often they turn into these, you know, theatrical performances where we gather a subset of the people who are in the actual meeting to align on what we'll discuss and, you know, what the decision will be before we even have the meeting. And then likewise, often in follow-up meetings, people will try to ask. unravel the decisions made in the actual meeting in a way that's really harmful for the organization and the decision making. And so thinking as well about, you know, when do I absolutely need a

pre-meeting versus post-meeting and making sure that's transparent to everyone in the actual meeting is another aspect of attentionality around the frequency dimension. Okay. So this thought keeps popping into my head. So I'm just going to bring it up. I don't know if it's relevant for everybody. but one of the things I see organizations or leaders often hold meetings for is I'm just going to put it under the umbrella of accountability. It's their way of checking if people are doing what they're supposed to be doing or, you know, communicating tasks. I don't know that it fits your 4D CEO test. So how do we hold people accountable, keep people on task, assign task, whatever is happening in those meetings without holding a meeting? It's really important. And you're right that often we know that a meeting is the most reliable way to get people's attention, right? You can snooze your slack messages. You can pretend you didn't see an email. But a meeting is highly reliable in getting people in the room and making sure they're doing the work. There are a whole host of different reasons why that negatively impacts the meeting, the other people in the room. And so I talked. I talked.

in the book about as you're thinking about the communication stack within your organization, figure out where is that system of record where you're holding people accountable for work. So I spent seven years working at Asana, the work management platform. That's an example of a tool that allows you to have fewer meetings because the work is tracked and people are accountable in the platform, right? There's a system where people know who's doing what by when, why and how in a way that you don't need the meeting to ensure that that's carried through to fruition. And if somebody's tracking what they're doing and how they're doing it and how often they're doing it, if a difficult conversation needs to be had, you know, then that's a one-on-one

or an outreach or whatever. What I'm hearing, though, and I may have just made this up, is if we're having meetings to bring people together to talk about the work that they're doing that's being tracked, we're either shaming or we're celebrating, but either way, we're taking something individual and turning it into a group event that probably makes it not very productive for a lot of the people in the room. Is that fair? That's absolutely fair. And often there's, you know, repetitive conversations that happen in a way that is annoying for people to, they start to become frustrated that their time is being wasted. The key enabler of fewer meetings, and we see this in remote first organizations in particular,

is a documentation culture and a transparent documentation culture, because the more people can self-serve information, the more they can go into a work management software or project management tool and understand the status of work, the less they're relying, on meetings to do that work. And the more they can use asynchronous tools in a way that saves time and makes for a better work environment for their colleagues as well. In the book, you talk about, I think you reference a study, but the tipping point of too much meeting time is about 10 hours a week. That's about the most any one person is interested in. You focus on return on time invested

versus time in meetings. Help us understand how we could shift our thinking to that as well. Yeah. So measuring meetings is both important and incredibly difficult. And part of that is because we have this knee-jerk reaction to associate meetings with negativity. And in the book I call it the meeting suck reflex, where we're socially conditioned to believe that meetings are best.

bad. And part of that is rooted in reality. Most meetings are dysfunctional. And so because we know, as my colleague and co-author Bob Sutton will say, bad is stronger than good. And so because we have many more negative meetings and dysfunctional meetings and positive ones, we have this sentiment around meetings as negative forces within our organizations. And so that's why you can't just go into an organization or you can't just ask your employees, how effective are your meetings or how much do you enjoy meetings? Because this natural meeting suck reflex will kick in in a way where you're not going to get any sort of useful information. And so I recommend, and I mentioned Elise Keith at the beginning, she introduced me to this concept of return on time investment. So it's a simple scale,

zero to five, was this meeting worth your time? And I recommend in about, 10% of cases as a meeting organizer, you're asking attendees, was this meeting worth your time? And if you want a follow-out question, what would enable this meeting to gain one point on the scale next time? What would you do differently? And what that does is it avoids the meeting suck default reaction. Everyone has an intuitive sense of how valuable their time is. and you're able to get a much more grounded view of whether your meetings are effective. Now, that should be paired with other metrics. And right now we're living in a digital world where the meeting metrics and analytics we can

gather and glean are incredibly exciting and very much, you know, that subjective, qualitative feedback should be paired with more objective metrics. But that return on time investment is something we can easily do to get a pretty good feel as to whether we're designing meetings that are useful for the people who we're expecting to show up for them. And that leads me perfectly into the next question, which is how do we design meetings that are useful but also interesting or you talk about injecting delight into meetings. I do think we live in a world where we're sort of used to being infotained. and so useful, but also some measure of enjoyment of being there, how do we create meetings that do both?

Yeah, so it's a great question. And often, especially when I work with organizations, often the North Star is efficiency, right? We want our employees to spend less time in meetings. They're dragging on. There's no time for focus work. And efficient meetings are important. But if we're designing meetings,

effectively, many meetings should not be highly efficient. And if we think about that D around developing yourself, your team, meetings are very important arenas for building relationships and engaging in creative pursuits. And they shouldn't always be highly, highly efficient. And so in the book, I talk about delight and the importance of in every meeting, there should be at least one element of delight. And delight is a very interesting phenomenon and concept in the sense of it essentially involves two components. One is an element of joy, right? Something that makes people smile or happy and an element of surprise, right? It shouldn't be something that people necessarily see coming. And so this doesn't need to be an extravagant gesture. It can be a shout out that

someone isn't expecting in the meeting. It can be, you know, bringing a set of big goods to the meeting in a way that, you know, surprises people and delights people with a personal story behind it. But if we want meetings to be memorable and be intentional, we need to think about, okay, how can we make them such? And a joy, surprise, delight is one of those mechanisms that I think are, is really important and broadly this fits under the design principle of user-centric design. Just as we develop our products and services with the user in the driver's seat in terms of how we're designing, we need to be doing the same for meetings. The attendees are the users. We as the organizers are not the users of the meeting. So often we design meetings for ourselves as the organizers.

We need to be designing them for the attendees. And a key rule is, treat your audience's time, your attendees time, as more valuable than yours as you're designing the meeting and running it. You just hit on a pet peeve of mine. I can't tell you how frustrated I've been when somebody calls a meeting and they show up 15 minutes late or they're the organizer or the facilitator. And they're sending the message every possible way that they can that they feel their time is more valuable than mine or the other attendees. And I just think that that is a really important thing to think about. And it's a message that gets sent so frequently that I don't even think people are noticing. So I appreciate you saying that. Now, I do hope that

people who are organizing meetings are tuning in and will get your book and go through this. But the reality is many of us are attending meetings where we're not the organizer or we're not the decider or the leader in that situation. I love the idea of walking out of a meeting. if it's not relevant or impactful or I can't add value, but that feels like a really strong starting point or maybe scary starting point. How can we influence our leaders or organizers of the meetings that we're in, but we're not leading?

It's hard and it completely is dependent on the level of psychological safety within the organization. Fortunately, there are organizations, and I've had the privilege of working with many of them that are intentional about creating this psychologically safe environment where people do feel comfortable, you know, leaving a meeting, telling the organizer it could be more effective. But in most organizations, that level of psychological safety isn't there. And so there are some strategies in the book that I outline.

One is around how are you framing this feedback to the, the meeting organizer. And what we know is, and this comes from research by Amy Edmondson and colleagues who coined the term psychological safety, if you frame your feedback as curiosity as opposed to an assertion, that dislodges some of this threat that powerful people often feel when someone beneath them in the org chart voices a concern or criticism. So if you start to say things like hey, I've noticed that in this meeting that's 30 minutes, we spend 20 minutes reviewing the status of the project and only have 10 minutes for real-time discussion. What if we started with the real-time discussion? How might that change the meeting? So you're not necessarily framing it as an

assertion. You're not even framing it as an opinion. You're framing it as a curiosity. That sort of dislodges the sense of threat associated with what you're saying about the meeting. Even if you know you're gritting your teeth, the meeting is unproductive. Framing it as more curiosity can be a way to dislodge some of that threat. The more we can start to use analytics to assess our meetings and normalize that can be effective as well because it sort of puts the blame, puts the threat on the technology as opposed to the humans in the room. And so I've worked with organizations where, you know, there has been a tendency among the senior

leaders to dominate the airtime within the meeting. We know that equal airtime is one of the strongest predictors of team performance, but often we see senior leaders, often we see men take up more of the airtime in the meeting. Using an analytic tool that will show how airtime is distributed in the meeting and show that, you know, the senior leader is consuming 70% of the airtime, that no longer makes the individuals in the room threatening, you're putting the blame on the technology. that is objectively telling you the situation in terms of how that distribution of airtime is playing out. So that's another practice. You know, the more we normalize metrics, analytics in a way that come across as objective,

the more likely we are to help to change meeting cultures in some of these more psychologically unsafe environments. Rebecca, I have one million more questions, and I really want to drag you to every one of my meetings or every meeting that I know is going on out in the world. but I do have one last question, and it's around, you know, as we've been talking, I think, at least in my mind, I've been thinking a lot of more corporate business meetings, but I would imagine this applies to nonprofits, family meetings, school boards. I mean, there are so many meetings happening for so many reasons out in the world. How might people apply this to different meetings with different resources?

What are some key takeaways that you think are just are helpful across the board? I think at the core of this is intentionality and discipline, right? Our time is so valuable. It's the most valuable asset resource we have. And as we're thinking about any time we show up and expect another person to synchronously give their time, we should be intentional about how we spend that time. I vividly recall last holiday season, my uncle sitting us around the dinner table, And having a conversation that injected that delight, asking people, you know, what's the most recent accomplishment in your life, drawing people in, right? Even if you're having a dinner conversation, that intentionality showing up as a full human is important in the office and outside of it as well.

Okay. Well, listener, whether you're thinking of a corporate meeting or a family table meeting or any meeting, you must absolutely. get your hands on the book. It's called your best meeting ever. Get it for yourself and everyone you work with. And you can find out more about Rebecca and her work out of her website, Rebeccahines.com. We'll put those links as well as every other way to find and follow Rebecca in show notes. Rebecca, thank you for doing this work or helping us make this more effective and not like a sabotage thing from World War II. And thank you for being here as our guest. Thank you so much, Nicole. I've loved the conversation. Me too. All right, friend, here's the deal. You don't need more meetings. You need better ones. One's with purpose, ones with decisions, ones where the right people are in the room, and everyone else gets their time back.

Because every unnecessary meeting is stealing focus from the work that actually matters. And here's the quiet power move. You don't have to be the most senior person in the room to make this change. You can ask why you're there. You've can ask what decision needs to be made. You can decline the invite or walk out of the room. You can stop equating busyness with importance and airtime with leadership. Because time is not an infinite resource. Attention is not a badge of honor. And full calendars with empty outcomes helps exactly no one. So the next time a meeting pops up on your calendar, treat it like the product it is. If it doesn't serve the work or the people doing it, it doesn't deserve it. It doesn't deserve of the space. That's not rebellion, that's respect. And that, my friend, is woman's work.