What Do You Do When You're (Actually) Working?

37 snips

Feb 11, 2026

Guest

Jen Fisher

Guest

Rebecca Hinds

Rebecca Hinds, meetings expert who treats meetings as products, and Jen Fisher, former Deloitte well-being officer and author on hope in organizations. They challenge the calendar status quo and outline meeting resets and the rule of halves. They reframe hope as an actionable strategy and warn that misaligned incentives erode well-being. Short, practical ideas for reclaiming focus and meaning at work.

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INSIGHT

Value Is Your Insight, Not Hours

You don't get paid for time or raw output; you get paid for insights that others can't produce.
Todd Henry argues your unique intuition and pattern recognition create disproportionate value employers pay for.

INSIGHT

Meetings Are A Product To Optimize

Meetings are the most important product in organizations yet remain the least optimized.
Rebecca Hinds says meetings shape decisions, culture, and priorities, so treat them like products to iterate.

ADVICE

Run A Meeting Doomsday

Delete recurring meetings for 48 hours and rebuild your calendar deliberately.
Rebecca Hinds recommends this "meeting doomsday" to reset purpose and remove social pressure to keep legacy meetings.

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In this episode, we dive deep into the real value of creative work—what we truly get paid for, beyond our time and output. We bring together two insightful thinkers, Rebecca Hinds and Jen Fisher, whose perspectives on meetings and hope transform how we structure our work days and support our teams.

We explore why most meetings sabotage productivity and how “visibility bias” tricks us into equating a full calendar with actual progress. Rebecca Hinds (author of Your Best Meeting Ever) challenges us to rethink meetings as products: expensive, important, yet often poorly optimized. She shares actionable strategies like "meeting doomsday" and the "rule of halves" to declutter calendars and refocus collaboration.

Shifting gears, we unpack the often-overlooked topic of hope in organizational culture. Jen Fisher (author of Hope Is The Strategy) reframes hope as a strategic, action-oriented process, not just a feel-good slogan. We discuss Gallup’s finding that hope ranks higher than trust as what people want most from leaders, and how misaligned incentives erode both hope and well-being, leading to disengagement and burnout.

Throughout, we challenge creative pros to rethink their real value—insight, intuition, and emotional logic—and encourage leaders to create environments where these qualities flourish.

Five Key Learnings:

Insight is Indispensable: Our unique perspectives, intuition, and courage—not just our time or output—are what make us valuable in creative roles.
Meetings Need a Reset: Meetings often serve as a status symbol rather than a tool for progress. Treating meetings as products and regularly auditing their purpose and effectiveness can dramatically improve collaboration.
Subtract to Add Value: Applying the “rule of halves”—cutting meeting length, attendees, agenda items, or frequency—forces us to focus on what’s truly essential and breaks the cycle of addition sickness.
Hope Is Strategic, Not Sentimental: Hope is a cognitive, actionable process that drives teams forward. Organizations must foster strategic hope to encourage risk-taking and innovation.
Alignment Drives Well-being: Stated values must match incentives and systems. Misalignment between what leaders say and reward creates dissonance, burnout, and disengagement.

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