How to cope with excessively long retrospective meetings
We've been doing Kanban for some time and the retrospective meetings are taking at least 1-2 hours. Adding that to the validation/general overview meetings, I'm at the point that the entire morning is spent doing not-so-useful meetings.
At the end I feel my brain is completely drained.
How should I cope with such horrendously long meetings? Take a break after a meeting to recover a bit. Don't feel obliged to stay as productive as on the days that don't have meetings. If you are demanded to be as productive on the days with meetings, then you can just explain that your attentional resources are limited and the demand is excessive. After all, you are paid for the time spent on meetings, so it's not you, but the business is the entity which should bother about productiveness of your time.