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7 Steps To Mastering The Art Of A Productive Meeting

You have dragged and dropped yet another meeting to your schedule. You already know you’ll see a bunch of annoyed faces around the meeting table. It’s not you. It’s the way meetings are being held. 41.9% of the meetings are evaluated to have poor quality. But you can do better. You can actually plan a meeting that is both useful and enjoyed by your team. You can feel happy after you have scheduled a meeting using your resource planning tool. And it’s something you are going to have to master. Knowing how to keep the quality of your meeting high is one of the most important skills you have to ace to manage a project team.

1. Don’t Have a Meeting Just to Have a Meeting

Can’t stress this enough. You don’t get a badge of honor for having the most meetings. Your projects’ progress isn’t better because you had more meetings. Pointless meetings take away the time that could have been used for actually, you know, completing tasks. If someone else is inviting you to a meeting that has no point, just say no.

You should start kind of a protest for pointless meetings in your organizations. Don’t plan or attend meetings that are pointless. If someone has scheduled a meeting just to have a meeting and you don’t dare to say no to them, send a link to this blog post to them.

STOP HAVING MEETINGS THAT CAN BE AN EMAIL. Please. In the name of everything that matters.

2.Have Clear Objectives and Agenda

The objectives of the meeting should be clear. You can check if the objectives were clear enough by asking someone at the end of the meeting, “What was the purpose of this meeting?”. If the question can be and is answered with five words or less, you probably did well.

The way to achieve the objective you have set for your meeting is to have an agenda. Meeting agendas should be provided to participants before the meeting. However, it never hurts to go over the agenda and objectives once more at the beginning of the meeting.

Doing so will help you to keep yourself on track and it’s a good way to remind others what the meeting is about. There’s always that one person that didn’t read your email about the agenda. That way you’ll get their attention, too.

3. A Meeting Should Have an End Time

Your meetings hopefully already have a start time. What they might not have is an end time. Set an end time. Imagine that you have to (don’t ask why, you just have to, life’s that way sometimes) start doing crunches at 2 pm. Imagine the torture if you don’t know when you can stop doing them. The next one might be the last one. The one-hundredth one might be the last one. It would feel much better if you knew you had to do crunches for 2 minutes, right?

Well, it’s the same way with meetings. It’s just easier to concentrate if you know how long the meeting will be. The second good thing about the end time is that the participants will actually know how much time they should plan.

The third good thing is that an end time keeps the meeting on track since it’s easier to stay on topic when you know the time to discuss it is running out. If you are using a resource planning tool to schedule your meetings, you are already kind of forced to set an end time. You can easily schedule meetings by assigning one task to multiple resources in Ganttic.

The end time should never be random. Take a look at your agenda. Set a time estimate for each topic. Go by these estimates. You can even go so far that you start a timer before starting the discussion for each topic. Whatever works best for you. Just have an end time. You’ll see a rise in productivity and creativity. It’s a promise.

4. Shorter Meetings are Better

You have already heard about 15-minute stand-up meetings. You can schedule 1-minute precision in Ganttic. The reasoning behind 15 minutes being the ultimate default time for a meeting is simple – the average attention span isn’t longer than 18 minutes and you are more alert and more creative while you are standing up. If you are used to meetings that can run for hours, cutting them to 15 minutes might seem impossible.

So you have set your agenda and estimate the optimal time for each topic and make sure the sum isn’t over an hour. Then see if you can group topics from your agenda somehow? If you can, do it. The topics and the groups will make up the agendas for a number of shorter meetings.

Maybe you’ll even understand that one of the topic groups can easily be solved with a few emails. If there is no way to group the topics in your agenda or there is some other reason why you just can’t have short meetings, have regular breaks. Keep the average attention span in mind when you are thinking of when would be a good time for a break.

Additional timing tip: Some say it’s better to start a meeting at a more random time like 3:07. That way people will actually be there a bit sooner and the fuzz at the start of a meeting is diffused.

5. Less (Technology) is More

For the best meeting results, less people and technology is better. Just make sure you have the right tool to help.

Even a slideshow might be too much. If the slideshow doesn’t give actual additional information, it doesn’t help. Keep in mind that your team values meetings that they can actually contribute in. They can watch a slideshow on their own.

Don’t allow laptops for taking notes. You know how it goes. You have your computer in front of you. Oh, I’ll just check my email, it’ll take a second. Oh, I’ll answer a few of those, it’ll take a minute. Computers take the focus away from the meeting.

We can’t multitask. We can only pretend we are multitasking while abandoning one task to do the other. That’s why you shouldn’t allow phones in the meeting room either. If you schedule meetings that last 15 minutes, there are no fires that can’t be put out after the 15 minutes is over. Unless you are dealing with actual firefighters. If you are, you’ll probably have to modify that rule.

6. Less (People) is More

If there are fewer people, there’s actually more discussion. It’s all because of the diffusion of responsibility, or more specifically social loafing. An individual is less likely to actually participate in a situation when others are present or they are likely to put in less effort than they would when they were working alone.

This, of course, doesn’t mean you should stop having meeting altogether. Simple effort math tells us that if five people put in 80% of their potential effort, the sum is still greater than one person giving their 100%. However, 20 people giving 1% of them doesn’t seem to make much sense now, does it?

7. Meetings Should Have Results

That one is simple. If your meeting already has clear objectives and an agenda, clear results shouldn’t be hard to achieve. Was the issue resolved? No? Did you assign tasks that would resolve the issue? Was the question answered? No? Did you assign someone to find the answer? Was the problem cleared out? No? Did you think of a way the problem can be cleared out?

Basically, there should be results and/or clear steps your team should take to deliver results. That’s the way Apple and Google do it. Without results, the meeting is just a waste of time.

Schedule a Better Meeting with Ganttic

Meetings are an essential part of the modern workplace. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to make them better. With these tips and some help of a task resource scheduler like Ganttic, you can ensure that your meetings are more productive. And that your team members don’t dread them on a weekly basis. It is possible!

Improve your team’s meetings and productivity with resource planning.