When do you stop trying to achieve an objective?

It's important to know when you should stop trying to achieve a goal. Many people love to refer to this quote from Albert Einstein "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is stupid".
As an example of this quote let's look at a Software Development project that is trying to achieve it's objectives by following the traditional/waterfall Project Management Methodology. If you tried this 5 times before and you always struggled to deliver what you set out to deliver then it's time to realize that something needs to change. You might have changed your approach to an agile Project Management Methodology and realized it wasn't quite the smooth ride you expected. That means even though you changed the approach it was not really successful, maybe it even was a disaster. Does that mean you can't do any projects anymore because neither approach worked? It doesn't mean that you give up (!) but instead of following a certain approach you have to adjust it to your needs. For me there is a difference between being persistent and being delusional. If a certain approach doesn't work then you have to be innovative and try something new. You have to stop wasting precious energy on something that doesn't work. You don't want to do that without really trying but you also don't want to wait until it's too late. Always check your approach as often as possible to see if something needs to change and determine what needs to change. The timing for these checkpoints depends on your cicumstances, but don't be afraid to stop one approach and switch to something more promising. Just don't give up to find a solution!

How important are meetings?

If 80% of your calendar is booked with meetings then you might want to review how you schedule your days. I understand that the more senior a manager is in an organization he or she will have to be more aligned with other teams and hence will need to meet more often. Nevertheless if the alignment takes around 80% of your time something might need to be adjusted. How do you decide in which cases you need to have a meeting? Do you have more "FYI" or "decision focused" meetings? Is the planned meeting time a good use of time for all participants? Does your company culture measure your importance based on how many meetings you are invited to? Are you delegating enough tasks to your team? It makes sense to thoroughly check why you go to that many meetings in order to free up more time. In order to do more great work you need to have some time to do this great work. One of the major risks I see with an excessive amount of meetings is that it gets very hard to innovate and be creative. Many leadership tasks are based on creative problem solving. My question to you is how do you do that on an ongoing basis if you don't find enough time? Many meetings just drain energy out of you. You can and probably have to do that for certain periods of time but you should not give in to that on a permanent basis. Review your schedule and only keep the meetings that you really need to achieve your desired outcomes.

Listen effectively

In order to learn anything we have to listen. Naturally we seem to have the ability to do that since we listen to our parents and others from early childhood on. We do it unconsciously but we do it and that is how we learn to speak. As we get older it seems to get harder to listen. We are more focused on our own interests and less on what others want. The interesting and sad thing is that the more we focus on ourselves the less we will achieve with others.
Let's look at a simple example: Wayne the Project Manager has a meeting with Mary the Controller about a potential budget cut for one of Wayne's Projects. Wayne has learned about the potential budget cut through the company grapevine and he is getting suspicious when Mary sets up a meeting with him. Wayne is preparing his defense and getting in his full battle mood even before he meets with Mary.
In order to have a meaningful and constructive meeting it would make sense for Wayne to first listen to Mary to understand her point of view better. He doesn't have to agree with her (!) but he needs to understand why she considers a budget cut. Once he has this information he can much more effectively address Mary's point of view. If Wayne prefers to just voice his frustration then he doesn't need to listen(!) and he will not achieve his objective to reverse or at least minimize the impact of the budget cuts. So listen really means that you have to stop thinking about yourself, put all your thoughts and interests aside for a moment and focus on the other person 100%. That is hard to do if you don't have a real interest for others.
You might be able to fake this for a little bit but the truth will come out quickly. Therefore stop faking interest because real interest has to come from the heart. Listen, learn and evolve!