Meetings
Let no one tell you that a coffee meeting must end in a caffeine-dazed, unproductive parting of ways. In fact, 99u’s Sean Blanda writes that a coffee meeting can be a powerful way to make a connection and accomplish some real work. The catch is you have to mean business.
Stan Portny, author of Project Management for Dummies, has been writing about improving the efficiency of company meetings for 20 years. Here’s his advice on organizing and delegating tasks when you’re the project manager.
Have you ever been in a meeting and needed to aggregate ideas and then organize them into projects? Here are several mind mapping apps worth trying, suggests marketer Kimberly Deas.
High-speed presentations, rambling discussions, unclear decisions, and vague action items at meetings without agendas make life hard for meeting note-takers, writes Lynn Gaertner-Johnston. Here are a few of her tips for organizing meetings that are easier to record.
Here’s an inexpensive tactic that could elicit great suggestions from employees who might not normally volunteer to contribute.
If you have contacts scattered around the globe, it’s important to make sure you’re correctly scheduling meetings across all time zones, writes technology expert Dave Johnson. Here’s how.
Meetings tend to get a bad rap. People complain that they stir conflict and competition among co-workers and generally represent a waste of time. It doesn’t have to be that way. Executive coach Mary Jo Asmus offers six ideas for organizing better meetings that can help strengthen workplace relationships.
If you find yourself repeating the same words over and over when you take minutes, Executive Assistant Nickey Christmas, who blogs all things PA, EA and VA related on her Practically Perfect PA blog, offers a good list of verbs “that you can slot into the minutes as and when you need them.”
For some people, a computer will never replace a pen and paper for note-taking during meetings. But for others, electronic notes may make more sense, especially if they have to share them electronically anyway. Here are three questions to determine which way is best.
If you frequently use the same words, phrases or paragraphs, you probably open up old meeting notices or emails to copy and paste. With Outlook 2010’s Quick Parts, you essentially have a permanent clipboard. For example, say you have specific language that you use for mandatory meetings. Here’s what to do.
If you want to get the most for your money when booking meeting or event space, you need to negotiate, says Anthony Coyle-Dowling. Don’t just accept the price you’ve always paid for the place you usually use or take the first price you’re quoted at a new location.
Let’s say you have a meeting scheduled to discuss resolving customer complaints. To prepare for the meeting, attendees search their inboxes and network drives to find related files they’ll need to begin visualizing a process. By inserting some of these objects into the meeting notice, you can help attendees better prepare for the meeting.
If dozens of daily interruptions siphon away your time, a series of Lunch ‘n’ Learns might be the solution.
