Do you struggle with unproductive meetings?
Sebastian Karges
23 replies
And what's your number one tip to make meetings better?
Replies
Shreya Gupta@shreya_gupta02
Yes 🙌🏽 But corporate life made me used to it 🙂 Tip _ use a product like otter.ai
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@shreya_gupta02 It's a pity that unproductive meetings are taken as 'the way it is' in corporates rn. Technology for the rescue!
I usually tell my team to use Slack/Loom video recording options to communicate info with other team members for things that are not discussed in our usual time slots.
@csrameneni great hack, we also do most communication async and meetings are intentional points to connect and prepare for.
I think the best way to keep meetings productive is to limit their length to 15 minutes, and be sure have an agenda to keep focus. Generally whoever called the meeting needs to be prepared.
Launching soon!
Calls > Meetings. With calls you can do something productive, like make diner or go for a stroll (Walking is good for brain oxygen). Ive begun denying any google meet, and asking for WhatsApp call instead.
@sentry_co Agree, love stacking different activities. I also like to meet up with colleagues for coffee walks = walk while discussion business :)
Launching soon!
@sebastian_karges "Stacking activities" That's my new favourite word! In the next google meet request I get. I'm going to say: Im into stacking activities, are you in? WhatsApp needs a google calendar integration tho. It's too hard to setup WhatsApp audio meetings atm. Im trying to make WhatsApp audio meetings a thing, but its too easy to slide into google meet+ google calendar invite 😅
@sentry_co Haha you're welcome. Think I've read somewhere about habit stacking, so that's where this comes from. You might be onto something here, I think there is lots of space for audio-only meetings, especially now where you can have AI take notes so you later have clear takeaways from the call.
Sometimes yes.
Basically, to solve these issues, periodically we organise special meetings to discuss how we can make meetings more productive and which ones can be optimised or completely dropped :)
As our team is mostly working remotely across the globe, We started using an app called "Gather" lately, it's a sort of virtual, game like office, where every team member have his own desk, where you have meeting rooms and all, and all you have to do to talk to someone, is simply walk with your character to your colleagues desk and the call will simply start, just like you will do in real life. Very cool app, we do much less meetings as we can discuss everything more efficiently.
The other app we use, is our own app @iteration_x that we created with this purpose in mind: Make medium and large teams do less calls, and focus more on shipping their product. Make the feedback process so much easier.
@iteration_x @salim_boudi Heard of that one before, thanks for sharing! So with Iteration X it's about better async collaboration so less meetings need to happen?
@sebastian_karges You're welcome 👍 yeah the async collaboration is made seamless, you give the maximum context to your collaborators with the minimum effort, especially if you work on a product or a website, where there is a feedback loop, that can be a never-ending story of back and forth and endless unecessary meetings and calls that ultimately make the whole team unproductive.
Hey there! As someone who thrives on tech and startup chaos, I've definitely had my fair share of unproductive meetings. My top tip to make meetings better? Keep it short and sweet like a well-crafted code snippet - get to the point, make actionable decisions, and let everyone get back to saving the world one line of code at a time. Here's to more productive meetings and less time wasted in the conference room! 🚀
I like giving a time frame upfront and cutting short once I realize it's a ''non-starter'' what also helps is to have a voice-only meeting.
@esranur_kaygin Yes so setting time and output expectations already in advance?
@sebastian_karges Yes as soon as a meeting is scheduled I send out an email saying to assist them better and prepare ahead of time, I ask for the questions they might have and ask about key questions since we sell an API in our case i ask about their tech stack. This is an automated email in our workflow.