When Priya said she had a hard stop at 3:30, her manager replied, “We’ll finish—just one quick thing.” The meeting ran 25 extra minutes and Priya missed a deadline. This episode unpacks how to make a hard stop work without becoming “difficult.” In 10 minutes we diagnose why end-times are treated as suggestions, offer three concrete, copy-paste scripts (gentle: "I have a hard stop at 3:30; can we table this for a 15-minute follow-up?", neutral: "I need to end at 3:30; who will own the next step?", assertive: "I must leave at 3:30—let's capture action items and schedule a follow-up"), and give a two-week pilot plan with clear KPIs (on-time end rate, percent meetings with documented outcomes, average follow-up latency). We include brief context notes for remote vs in-person and cross-cultural teams, accessibility tips (captioning and shared notes), and simple tracking tools (calendar tags, 1-question post-meeting form). Listeners leave with a downloadable one-pager toolkit to paste scripts and calendar settings into invites.