This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

The most expensive line in most companies is the recurring meeting nobody has questioned since the person who set it up left.

It survives because cancelling it requires someone to take responsibility for cancelling it, and attending it requires nothing.

What is actually wrong with your calendar

Half of what gets discussed could have been written down and read in four minutes. The meeting has eleven people in it because excluding someone felt rude. It was booked for an hour because the calendar defaults to an hour. It ends in warm agreement with no owners, so the same topic returns in three weeks slightly worse. And your own thinking time is whatever is left over, which is why the real work has moved to the evening.

None of this is a discipline problem. It is a design problem, and meetings can be designed.

How the course works

Thirty-six lessons in six parts. Facilitation first: the goal as a decision rather than a topic, choosing who is in the room, holding focus, closing with named owners, handling the participant who talks over everyone, and running it online where attention is even harder to hold.

Then your own calendar, six lessons of it. The audit that shows the difference between what you believe about your week and what it actually contains. Eisenhower and 4D, GTD, time-blocking and the golden hour — the block of deep work that meetings consume first.

Writing instead of meeting, and the one meeting to keep

Then six lessons on communication, which is the part most productivity courses miss. A large share of meetings exist to inform people, and informing is something writing does better. Audience segmentation, message design, channel choice, and measuring whether anything was read — plus the honest exception, because bad news does need a room.

Then the one-to-one, six lessons: the six formats, coaching with GROW, giving criticism that does not land as an attack, and making it standard across a team with an ROI case. It is the meeting most worth protecting and usually the first one cancelled when the week gets busy.

And finally the biggest meeting of the year — the two-day strategy offsite, prepared properly — and the group dynamics that determine how any of these sessions actually behave.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have also protected recurring meetings long after they stopped being useful, which is how I know the reason is never the calendar.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

The exercise everyone postpones

Open your calendar, find one recurring meeting, and write down the decision it produced last time it ran. If you cannot, that is the one to cancel — and you already knew which one it would be before you looked. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.