How to Save Meeting Times: Creating Powerful Meeting Agendas

When it comes to meetings, there are a number of things you can do to ensure that meetings are as productive as possible. We’ve previously discussed shortening meetings to just 15 or 30 minutes to keep everyone on track and focused on achieving a goal. However, we can increase the effectiveness of meetings by also setting a powerful agenda and communicating that at least 24 hours before the meeting. This practice does three things to help you maximize your time:

1. You can set the priority of what to discuss. If you find that your agenda has more than 3 items on it, then it is time to consider what can be covered in the meeting and what should be handled offline. By getting into the practice of outlining what you want to talk about, it enables you to pinpoint the most important things to discuss. If you do find that you need to address more than 3 items, then consider either extending the meeting to accommodate the extra discussion or holding more than one meeting to get resolution on all of the items.

2. Empowers everyone to show up prepared. When you have an agenda and share that with meeting attendees before the meeting, it gives them a chance to gather their thoughts and come to the meeting prepared to discuss. This reduces the amount of “context setting” or explaining that you have to do during the meeting and allows you (and everyone else) to jump straight into the discussion. Plus, if there are items on the agenda that have already been addressed, then people can let you know this so that’s one less item to bring up.

3. Give others time to contribute to the meeting. How often have you attended a meeting to later wonder why you were even invited to attend at all? When you communicate the agenda, you give attendees the chance to assess if they are the right people to address the communicated concerns/topics and who else may need to be added to the meeting. In this way you can make sure everyone is fully engaged, on the same page, and are the right people to have in the meeting to get results or to reach a decision.

These are just a few benefits that having a meeting agenda can provide. In addition, a meeting agenda can serve as a running record of what was already discussed and what needs to be discussed further, so you can reduce any future meeting redundancies.