What are your best meeting hacks? 👨🏻‍💼🚀

I've been thinking a lot about meetings recently. So many of us are stuck with unproductive meetings day in and day out. So I wrote a post about it on Medium today and shared my best tips on how to make meetings productive.

You can find the post here!

tl;dr

1. A meeting isn't always needed. Asynchronous communication can replace a lot of meetings.
2. Meetings should have a deadman switch and should be short by default.
3. Always have a solid agenda! Don't aimlessly conduct meetings.
4. Fewer people = better meetings!
5. Get team members to engage more. Make sure quieter members also contribute to discussions.
6. Always have someone take meeting notes and share them afterward. People should know what actionable items have been decided!

Got any hacks of your own?

I'm curious and always looking to make communication with my team more productive! Share your best advice with me. You can do it in the comments or on this Twitter thread.

Here's a cheatsheet for better meetings.

Anyway, share your thoughts! Cheers!

Comments

[Madza]

Early on at Google, there was an engineering decision to use “Python where we can, C++ where we must.”

I would transfer the same principle to meetings "Slack where we can, on-site where we must". Goes well with your #1.

[Keagan Van Rooyen]

Although this idea isn't productive, it can help with team engagement. One of my previous TL's got us to do this, so we could get to know each other better.

Basically you get one member of the team to make a presentation on something (Where they are from, a hobby, what they work on, anything really). We sometimes even added quizzes - although that was to keep us awake during night shift.

[Rachel]

I find this to be a good one - only use meeting time for decision-making. Information-gathering should always be done before the meeting.

[Wayne Smallman]

Hi @sarthology , point 6 is perhaps the most important part of the process, and I find it‘s the one most often neglected.

I was talking to two friends this morning about a workflow I have for capturing the meeting as a narrative, which is:

1. beforehand, I create a note for the agenda of the meeting;
2. I then create a note during the meeting, and link to the note for the agenda, and add a description to the link that explains some essential context, such as the differences between the agenda and what’s happening during the meeting;
3. afterwards, I send an email with the minutes of the meeting, what was agreed, next actions and such, and link that to the note for the meeting.

So, the “link to the note for the agenda, and add a description to the link that explains some essential context” is specific to the product I've built, the Under Cloud, but a similar if less useful workflow could be made from notes with the appropriate titles, or folder structure.

[Tanmaiy Bhateja]

I always feel something like "Pun of the day" before every meeting would make the teammates more cheerful and engaged too.

[Moein]

A friend of mine developed a project called tooqan
I used it for some time and it provided some good vision but the problem is that you need everyone to use to get more value out of it

[Abby Hanssen]

This has some great points, thank you!