By Rachel Hill

** 9 a.m. – 10 a.m. team meeting

** 10:30 a.m. – 11 a.m. client meeting

** 11:30 a.m. – 12 p.m. sales meeting

** 2 p.m. – 3 p.m. meeting that could have been an email

Does this look familiar? If you’re like me and dread wondering how you’re going to get any actual work done when your day is filled with meetings, maybe it’s time to start advocating for your most valuable asset: your time.

This meeting could have been an email.

We all KNOW the memes and the eye rolls that have spawned from being overly ZOOMed out since the pandemic. But what we should really take from this sentiment is the concept not necessarily of canceling meetings but rather making them more succinct. One of things I give our Foresight team credit for is that we have really done the work to make our meetings hold more meaning. We’ve broken them down into three different days, each meeting an hour. We have one for internal projects, one for our partners and one just for our team to gab over morning coffee on Fridays, which I absolutely LOVE for helping to create our culture. 

Don’t run up the clock.

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, who I like to call the godfather of content creation, has some incredible advice on how to not suffer from meeting burnout! 

Don’t OVERTHINK it.

Gary likes to make his fast, but that doesn’t mean he’s not invested. It’s just he follows his gut and knows what he wants. The best way to get results is to just start taking action. Inaction is one of the biggest things that holds us back in all facets of our lives. 

Efficiency leads to understanding.

Shorter meetings force you to be more concise. How many times have you walked away from a meeting wondering, “What did we EVEN talk about?” That lost feeling where you don’t know what you’ve accomplished and feel like you have no tangibles. This can be avoided by not talking around issues but rather by direct communication. 

Accomplish MORE by doing LESS.

If your meetings take up less “brain space” and you can leave them with clearly identified goals to accomplish, it creates a feeling of empowerment. You’re not going around in circles trying to figure out what to do next. 

Feel truly accomplished.

In a time of “hustle culture” and millennials being stereotyped as “lazy,” it’s so easy to fall into the trap of filling our schedules just to fill them. Being busy may feel great and like you’re “ticking boxes,” but maybe we’re filling a void instead of just filling time. So if you find yourself in meetings and not sure what goals are being accomplished, offer solutions instead of complaining. My team jokingly teases me, saying I’m “anti-meeting,” but they’ve come to understand that it’s not the meetings I dislike, it’s the idea of wasting our most valuable asset. We set goals, do our best to follow an agenda, and also give one another grace when we do get sidetracked. Because none of us are perfect!