Meetings
Meeting timeline
Start of the meeting
- Give at least 30m notice, in addition to any extra time people might need to gather information
- Everything on the table, no surprises
- Don’t start just before your lunch or before the end of the business day when people will be leaving
- Have an agenda with stated goals and a scheduled end time
- If you’re going to use the projector or teleconferencing, come in 5m earlier than start time so you don’t bungle the first critical minutes
During the meeting
- Don’t marry your ideas - be open to suitable alternatives
- Keep a list of actionable items
- Be objective
- When it seems that a conversation is going into technical details best handled outside of the meeting, say so, try to get back to the agenda
End of the meeting
- At scheduled endtime, decide if you need to continue. Let people who need to leave go, and maybe take a 5 minute breather to clear your head. Set a new end time.
- Do a quick overview of the action items, confirm you’ve hit all agenda points.
Meetings, Bloody Meetings
- plan - be precise about the objectives and why you need the meeting
- inform - what people need to bring to the meeting
- prepare - the logical sequence of items (prioritizing the important)
- structure and control - present evidence first, then discuss without jumping around
- summarize and record - write down the who/what of action items, decisions