Fix your meetings
Let's face it. Meetings are often a waste of time, and most attendees would rather be working. These meeting flaws might sound familiar to you:
- There are too many attendees. Six people in a meeting means five of them are not 100% active at any given time. Attention spans decrease for those not actively participating.
- They're not outcome-oriented. “let’s have a meeting”, “let’s catch up on that” is so frequent, as if meetings were the actual solution. They're not. But work sessions with a clear agenda and outcome can help you reach solutions.
- They're just reporting. Should you be wasting multiple people's time listening to each other report what they did? Reporting can be done asynchronously. It conveys messages better and lets you do actual work during the meeting.
The good news is that once you've acknowledged the above, you can start making your meetings more productive—starting with this template.
Turn them into work sessions
Use meetings as work sessions, where reporting and agenda are prepared and reviewed ahead of time, with this template. Use the meeting for debates, discussions and decision-making. Here are some additional tips to make your meetings worthwhile:
👸Each work session has a dedicated owner.
📝 The owner prepares the report and agenda.
💌 The owner sends it to all attendees, at least a day in advance.
🙇 Each attendee reads the report and works on the agenda.
🏗️ The session is about actually working on each point.
📝 The owner takes note on the session takeaways and outcomes on the doc, for everyone to refer to.
Next time you have a meeting planned, use this template and apply these tips.
