When to Have a Meeting and When Not to

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Leaders should have meetings when there is a need for interaction and engagement. Meetings should have a purpose: to decide, learn, bond, or complete tasks. If the goal does not require interaction, it could have been an email. Good ideas and knowledge can be generated asynchronously. Many meetings just repeat what everyone already knows, leading to groupthink. Meetings should be intentional and consider the necessary time, even if it's as short as 10 minutes. Standing up during meetings can improve focus and make them shorter without compromising decision quality.

WorkLife with Adam Grant, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective is back! This season, Adam takes a look at how to find meaningful work and how to make jobs more energizing. In this first episode: meetings. Meetings often drain our joy and sap our focus — and meeting overload kills productivity. So why do we have so many of them — and is a better world possible? Adam investigates the science of improving meetings and explores how workplaces are fighting meeting bloat. Available transcripts for WorkLife can be found at go.ted.com/WLtranscripts