Make Meetings Worth the Time

Action items that stick

“We have too many meetings” is a nearly universal gripe. The more meetings we have, the less attention we are able to give to each meeting. The less of our attention we give in a meeting, the more likely we will rehash the meeting’s discussions and decisions … with yet more meetings. Hence the adage, “The meetings will continue until morale improves.”

My team used to joke about building an app that showed how much a meeting cost the company. The math was straightforward. You build a table of the average hourly rate for each level band by dividing the salary by 2,080 hours (40 hours per week * 52 weeks in the year). Here’s the math based on Comparably’s¹ distillation of averages for Microsoft:

• Level I - average salary: $129K - hourly rate: $62

• Level II - average salary: $135K - hourly rate: $65

• Senior - average salary: $176K - hourly rate: $85

• Principal - average salary: $239K - hourly rate: $115

• Partner - average salary: $393K - hourly rate: $189

Then you calculate the cost of the meeting by adding up the hourly rates of everyone in the room. So a 15-person weekly status meeting composed of 1 Partner, 3 Principals, 8 Seniors, and 3 IIs would work out to a company cost of $1,409.

The point of the app is to raise the awareness of everyone in attendance to make the time together worthwhile. I guess we could take it one step further and have a $ counter displayed on the screen that for the above example meeting would tick up $0.39 every second. But then we run the risk of people just staring at the dollar counter².

Meetings are costly. So you better make sure they’re not a waste.

Short of having that app, you can still raise your own awareness ahead of a meeting by following this <5 minute prep routine.

1. Pick your favorite time management mantra³, such as “Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves”, and use it to help sharpen your focus on the task ahead.

2. Look at the invite to see who all is in attendance and use the number of attendees to further sharpen your focus.

3. Read the goal and agenda of the meeting to get yourself in the right frame of mind.

Successful meetings close important open issues and raise clear action items. From a Triage Shield⁴ standpoint, meetings are an input-rich environment. So you want to come into every meeting in an attentive state, and you want to bring along a solid triage process for all the meeting inputs that should be raining down in the meeting.

A Public Triage Process

Meetings generate action items. These action items are inputs for your Triage Shield to process. What is unique about the inputs to your system that come from meetings is that you have an opportunity to create a public triage process that is on display for everyone to see, use, and learn from. After your private victories of shaping your own triage process for email⁵, chats⁶, and team project work⁷, you’re now ready for a public victory with the triaging of meeting action items.

The best way to create and refine your organization’s meeting triage process is to volunteer to be the notetaker in meetings. As the meeting notetaker, you can model the straightforward routine needed to make clear action item tracking a reliable outcome of that meeting.

Set the Meeting Up for Success

Here is how you set yourself up for success in the two minutes before the meeting starts⁸.

1. Create a shared document (such as a Word document or a new page in the Meeting Notes section of your team’s OneNote notebook) and paste the meeting agenda and goals into the document.

2. Paste a link to this document into the chat for the meeting, accompanied by a comment to encourage contributions such as, “Notes for today’s meetings are here: <<link>>. Everyone has read/write access and you should feel free to add your own insights to these notes. Thanks!”. Whether this meeting is fully remote, fully in-person, or hybrid, it will most likely be backed by a virtual meeting space that will have a chat window. Use it.

3. Project this document to the screen (either in the conference room or on the video call).

4. Set a “wrap it up” timer for 10 minutes before the end of the meeting (5 minutes for meetings 30 minutes long or shorter).

Model Awareness

Now, as the meeting progresses, everyone will see the notes your capturing, and hopefully even adding some of their own. Whenever a note you capture is an action item, put a special mark by it. In OneNote, you can hit Ctrl+1 on the line to turn that into a “To Do” item with an unchecked checkbox next to it. In Word, you can put a star ⭐ emoji at the beginning of the line. if the conversation about this item included any specifics such as who should own it or when it needs to be done by, add those details to the line.

The more consistently you tag such items, the more awareness you will bring to all attendees of the importance of calling out action items. Follow this same process across meetings, and you will inevitably find others beginning to proactively mark additional action items as the meeting progresses, or perhaps add details to the action items you’ve tagged, such as volunteering to own an item. And even if people don’t notice the capturing of action items in real-time, they’ll notice it at the end of the meeting, when you’re going to shine a light on all of these action items.

Wrap It Up Right

When your “wrap it up” timer goes off, you either make a “T” timeout gesture on the screen or in the room, or if you carry around your favorite emoji cards like I do, you can just hold up the watch ⌚ emoji card 🙂. “This has been a great conversation. In our final 10 minutes, let’s make sure that all of the next steps are captured and are on people’s radars.”

Scroll to the top of the notes and work your way down, stopping at each tagged action item. Read the action item out, and then ask each clarifying question in order:

1. When do we need this action item to be completed by?

2. Who can take this action item on?

3. What do you need from this room for you as owner of this action item?

Once you’ve gotten through all of the items, ask one final question: “Can anyone think of anything that we missed here?” Capture all new items mentioned here. Then do another pass over these newly created items to answer the same three above questions.

The Finish Move

When the meeting ends, take two minutes to copy all the action items to the top of the meeting notes, under the banner: “Action item owners, when you complete your item, update these meeting notes and send a reply all mail to this meeting invite to inform everyone of your completion.” Copy this banner and list of action items and reply all to the invite with that list to clearly capture the next steps.

Your Private Triage Process

If you succeeded in the above process, then you now have a very straightforward triage process to get the action items you own into your own work management system. For each action item, create a page in your Actions section, and add a link back to these meeting notes as the originator of this action item. “This ask came from a meeting. When I complete this action, update the meetings notes <<here>> and send mail to the participants.” I typically also copy and paste the meeting invite mail onto the page so I don’t even have to go back to my calendar to find the invite that I’m going to reply all to.

People will start to notice. People will then start to follow suit in their own meetings. And then, when their awareness⁹ is sufficiently elevated, they may ask you what other helpful processes like this you have. That’s when you can show them your entire Triage Shield⁴.

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Footnotes

1. Microsoft Salaries (Comparably)

2. The “Don’t Just Stare at the Timer” section of Timebox Everything

3. The “Choose your Mantra” section of Timebox Everything

4. Triage Shield

5. Managing Email

6. Herding Chats

7. Manage Project Tasks Responsibly

8. The “Capture Progress” section of Life’s a Journey; Take Good Notes

9. Raising Your Own Awareness