And now we're going to get to that one place, that special place in your heart, meetings, planning meetings and being in meetings. because by the end of this video, you're going to know how to structure a highly effective meeting and how to make the meeting environment amazing. So let me start off with a little quote from Jeff Bezos. So in the book, Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, he talked about a counterintuitive point on communication. And here's what he said. Organizations shouldn't be striving for more communication, they should be striving for less, and communication is a sign of a dysfunctional organization. How does that work? Think about it like this, if you are constantly needing to communicate and clarify things, it means that different people in different parts of the organization are not working dynamically. It means there's a structural failure in the communication you have, which requires more and more and more communication. And you know exactly what I'm talking about, because you have been to organizations, you have worked in organizations, you have been to meetings where its like, why are we even having this meeting? Are we having another meeting, we just had a meeting? I feel like this meeting is a complete waste of time. You spend all your time in the meeting going, all the other things I could be working on right now. You thought this to yourself, this could have been an email. .And that's self perpetuating, and that's what Jeff Bezos was talking about. These organizations that are always communicating, communicating, communicating, but aren't getting anything done. .So is there too much of a good thing? Is there such a thing as too much communication? In this module, we are going to talk about how to make those moments, those meeting moments, highly effective. And it starts with an agenda, easy peasy, but there are three rules to an effective meeting agenda. And this is even more the case in a virtual meeting, where I can't necessarily see when you're listening or not. And here's the first component, a clear purpose. Now, right now you're going, yeah, I know, everyone says that, but let me add a tweak to that. It's not just a clear purpose, it's a clear purpose for every person coming. So if there are nine people in that email, that agenda says here's why you're here, here's why you're here, here's why you're here, here's why you're here. You know why, because that way you know that even if we're online and I’m not going to be able to see you, because we're using some GoTo meeting or some virtual communication tool. And the main thing we see is the slide agenda and then a bunch of slides, that person in the back of their head knows they’re there for a reason and they’re there to say something. Which is going to increase the likelihood that they're going to listen. So a clear propose for each person. Here is the second element to make an effective meaning agenda, unreasonable time. Unreasonable time constraints for every person speaking, but planning reasonable time. So here's what I mean, suppose you're going to have a meeting, and a, b, c, and d are attending that meeting. You have allocated five minutes for a, five minutes for b, five minutes for c, and five minutes for d to report their summaries for whatever subject. Plan to give them ten. But the very fact that they know exactly when they're talking and how much they have to talk for, means they're going to plan better, means they're going to spend more time planning and preparing for that meeting. When the meeting actually happens, That unreasonable time constraint is going to force them to be highly effective with their time. If I know I have to speak, then I'll just plan to speak. If I know I only have three minutes to get through my report, I'm like, okay, I gotta cut some of this stuff out, and I gotta give some supplementary materials. Means I have to think about what I have to say, and boom, already you have a more effective meeting. Here's the third element to any effective meeting agenda, pre-allocate homework. So don't just tell them why they specifically have to come to this meeting. Don't just show them that you're going to have to talk about this subject for this amount of time. In that agenda also have what the potential homework will be. So the three elements of an effective meeting agenda is a clear purpose for every person there, an unreasonable time constraint and homework, work for after the meeting is done. And what you are doing is creating meetings that are hyperfocused. You are creating work environments that function around a meeting. Now, you're probably asking yourself, you're saying, well, what do these look like, do you have any examples? Of course we have examples, are you kidding me, check out the extra resources. In there, there's a couple of links and a couple of examples of effective meeting agendas.