Effective Meetings

Published 2023-04-04

I've compiled a list of what I think are best-practices around having effective meetings. This is probably incomplete, and it might be too opinionated, but I believe it's useful.

Calendar software

• Either accept or decline meetings, make sure to respond reasonable quickly.
• When you respond with 'maybe', make sure its a temporary state, and you actually turn it into an accept or decline soon.
• When you decline a meeting, make sure you decline with a reason in the notes field.

Attending a meeting

• Be on time, e.g. arrive in the first minute. Figure out your notifications if this is difficult for you.
• If you will be late, or if can't make it last-minute, send the organiser a message to notify them.
• Respect everybody, don't side-channel or second-screen, pay attention.
• Engage with the attendees, give direction by asking open questions instead of judgemental statements. Don't interrupt people. Always assume the most generous interpretation. See Effective Communication (12:19).
• When remote, turn on your camera and microphone (unless you have a lot of background noise, but even then there's apps for that).
• Stop on time, respect everybody’s time. This means mentioning 5 minutes before the end that it should end.
• Take notes, write down ideas and insights. The brain is good at having ideas, but very bad at storing ideas.

Organising a meeting

• Come up with a good title for the meeting, something every attendee will understand right away.
• Add a description to the invite, so attendees will know what the topic is, whether they are required or optional, and how to prepare themselves.
• When you are the organiser, you are (by default) expected to host it.
• If you will not host the meeting (but you are the organiser), specify in the description who will host it.

Hosting a meeting

• Introduce the context and goal of the meeting in the first 5 minutes.
• If you have a specific format (code walk, discussion, workshop, etc.) in mind, explain it to the attendees.
• Explain what you expect to get done with the group in the time you have available. What is the output?
• When you're half way the allotted time, casually mention the expected output again, so everybody stays conscious of time and the goal.
• Five minutes before the end, start to close the meeting by summarising: repeating the conclusions and decisions that were made.
• Assign actions to specific people and come up with deadlines to make sure they get done (task+name+date).

After a meeting

• Read through your notes, add any other actions and insights you come up with.
• Decide on when you will do your actions, schedule time in your calendar if the task is large enough.