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What do you hate the most about meetings?
I am deep diving into the core problems of meetings to find the best angle to attack them, and would like your perspective on that!
Also, some related questions I’ve had in my head for a while now:
- How do you capture key moments (e.g. decisions made or next actions) during the meeting? If it’s note-taking, what do you use?
- Do you share a report after the meeting and if so, how do you share it?
- Do you use a dedicated tool (e.g. Jira, Todoist, whatever…) to track next actions?
As a PM in my current company, I take notes of most meetings myself, then consolidate minutes of meetings and share on Slack/Notion. Pretty burdensome, and the next actions end up kind of buried in my notes — Never a good way to hold people accountable 😅
Thanks a lot 🤗
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Mr Ethar Alali
Disclosure: Meetings are zero productivity events. I ensure I and my team avoid them as much as possible, unless the investment in the meeting is proving worth it.
However, where they have to happen, then for me, it depends on the meeting and its attendees. Because everyone knows email, less people know JIRA. So for tech teams, I do it in the latter. Ensuring actions are captured, but assigned as Tasks immediately, Not lost in a separate "Minutes document" (though of course, decision logs are useful).
When it comes to emails, I have a template email with a default top and tail. I then fill in the rest of the email with actions and decisions in the meeting, then send that as soon as the meeting finishes.
Recently, JIRA finally released its Email to Issue processor. I would link it but this comment would collapse until a mod got round to seeing it. So I'd suggest just Googling "JIRA Create issues and comments from email" and it should be the first link. That allows you to create tickets, usually one email at a time. So if you assigned a task to person X, you can email them and also BCC a specific email address you created for JIRA and JIRA would create the corresponding issue. All the fields that should appear in the email are shown in the Atlassian doc you should be looking at.
Hope that helps :)
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I am OK with meetings in general. One thing that I don't like is that I usually lose 10-15 min before and after each meeting. If I have 2 or more meetings per day, it totally ruins my productivity.
Maybe you want to take a look at comeet.me. Apart from async meetings, you can take notes and assign next steps directly from your Calendar and keep track of todos, that are automatically shared!
- How do you capture key moments (e.g. decisions made or next actions) during the meeting? If it’s note-taking, what do you use? : Typically in an email. What it means is you end up creating a todo list on emails and have to keep digging the email to see if all items reached a closure
- Do you share a report after the meeting and if so, how do you share it? - Yes. Over mail
- Do you use a dedicated tool (e.g. Jira, Todoist, whatever…) to track next actions? - No. But any tool you use needs to be used by rest of the org too
Key challenges that I face with meetings are
1. The context switch overhead
2. time spent getting everyone on same page and language before the actual conversation starts
3. Keeping track of all actionables
@archisman_das Hey mate, would love to have you give remoteworkly.co a try given it solves word to work of all the problems you're facing
- Capturing key moments through action points
- Report meeting done via talking points to all people involved in meeting
- Can use any tool you'd like to track action points as its synced with your account :)
Also to the OP, if this is invasive, apologies - please feel free to delete it!
When meetings feel unproductive. Either they drag on too long, go off track, or are unceccarily scheduled
I'm a big fan of short, productive meetings. We're a 6 person remote team; we meet every day for 45 min early in the morning. Everyone has a turn to speak in which they tell the team what they're working on and if they need help from anyone on the team. We use a shared Google Sheet where everyone registers their to do's during the meeting; the sheet has activity, category, who's responsible, priority (hi, med, lo), when it's due and status (pending, in progress, completed). At the end, I do a recap of the most critical issues and off we go... The system is simple and works wonders.
Here are some quick tips to prevent decision-fatigue:
1. Always do a check-in. If you don't know the group's emotional state, meetings can drag on too long, or you can get into heated debates.
2. Use the deep democracy model to keep the meeting within the 45 to 60 min range.
3. Check out with the question: 'What went well and what could we improve?'
It can be really easy for meetings to get on autopilot and stop providing value.
In a previous role, we had a weekly meeting that was created for a big project. Initially, it was extremely valuable to get multiple teams aligned around a goal.
But then the meeting never stopped and at some point became unproductive.
Simply asking the group "What is the purpose of this meeting?" led to some introspection that produced a few conclusions
1. We aren't entirely sure anymore
2. There were already other meetings in the week where the same issues were being discussed
3. We realized this meeting wasn't needed and could be canceled
Be wary of auto-pilot and inertia and always be willing to challenge if something is really needed and adding value, especially with meetings.
Been at this for a bit haha, have a look at remoteworkly.co if you'd like. The principle of having "time blocking" meetings is removed, and in addition - when meetings do happen you can create quality meeting notes, agendas and action points so no meeting is time wasted
Check out our product Neo. With Neo you can create action items before the meeting, share it with your team and then take notes and assign action items during the meeting. Neo also syncs with your calendar so all your meetings are in one place.
I hate when you arrive to the meeting and nobody have nothing prepared o read before. They expect to get on it and take decisions on the fly... If this happens, you should stop it or it will be a new standard.
In general I like meeting, but I don't like sending meeting recaps and followups. I capture key topics and decisions in Notes, I send recaps via email/Slack (email for external meetings and Slack for internal meetings), and track actions in Notion.
In general, I don't like meeting, I hate wasting time if the meeting is not really necessary, I don't like to have no preparation in advance, I don't like long speeches.