Running an effective meeting takes more than sending out a notice to notify your team when and where to meet. To help you hold better meetings, here are five hacks that will transform the way you gather with your team to generate new ideas, collect information, and make decisions.

1. Keep Your Meetings to a Manageable Size

The fewer people you invite to a meeting, the quicker and more efficient it will be. Inviting too many people to a meeting is a common mistake that leads to confusion, inaction, and wasted time.

Next time you set up a meeting, consider who and how many attendees you’re inviting to it, whether they’re relevant to the matters you want to discuss, and if they will be able to make a genuine contribution to the topic.

2. Set an Agenda and Stick to It

Think about how many times you have sat in a meeting that veered off course due to a lack of structure! They could’ve been avoided if someone had a game plan, which is very simple to create using apps like Sorted³.

Before a meeting, send out an agenda to everyone and clarify what topic(s) you will cover. When people know ahead of time what they’ll be discussing, they’re more likely to come prepared, thus making the best use of everyone’s time.

Having a clear meeting agenda will not only make it easier to cover off the essential points in order, it will also help to maintain everyone’s focus and calm meeting jitters.

3. Put on a Time Limit

A common complaint about meetings is that the time runs out when only there are still items on the meeting agenda to be covered.

You can avoid this by using a timer and set a time limit for each topic. Doing this heightens everyone’s awareness of the items that are lower down on the list. It also shifts the responsibility for timekeeping from the organiser (or no one at all) to the group as whole, making it a shared responsibility to decide whether to carry on discussing a topic or move on.

4. Record Everything

Whether the meeting is long or short, it can be difficult to keep your mind switched on through every moment of it. There’s a simple solution to this challenge: record all your meetings.

By recording meetings, you can…

• Make sure every detail is captured.
• Improve focus and engagement, as you won’t need to take copious notes.
• Reduce the time you spend typing out follow-up tasks and other action items to send off to the team.
• Collaborate effectively outside of the meeting room.
• Turn discussions into valuable information resources that everyone (even those who weren’t present at the meeting) can use.

If you’re looking for the ideal app to record every meeting while jotting down typed ideas at the same time, check out Noted and our unique features:

Time Stamps

Everything you type is timestamped to the meeting recording, marking the moment in your audio where every note is taken.

#TimeTags

Add #TimeTag to mark each #deadline, #todo, #actionpoint, etc. so you can jump straight to key moments in the audio with just one tap.

Skip Time

Skip forward and rewind to quickly get to the most meaningful moments during a meeting.

That’s not all, you can easily share your meeting notes with the team too to keep everyone on the same page at all times.

Noted is created to help professionals and meeting-goers like you capture great ideas anytime, anywhere. Download it today and discover more features to transform the way you record meeting notes.

5. Stand Up

If you’re back in the office and having in-person meetings, you know how easy it is to sit down, slump in the chair, turn on the laptop, and space out, which makes meetings last longer and less effective.

If you’re used to having meetings sitting down, try the next one standing up. People focus better on the topic(s) at hand when they’re standing, which makes meetings go faster because everyone wants to get through the agenda as quickly as possible, thus making them more time-efficient.

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Let’s have better meetings!

If you’re a team leader, consider implementing some or all of these hacks. If you’re a member of a team, you can always make suggestions so your meetings can become more productive.

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