In the modern workplace, "Agile" has become the gold standard for software development, marketing, and cross-functional project management. The core promise of the Agile Manifesto is simple: individuals and interactions over processes and tools. It was designed to liberate teams from the rigid, documentation-heavy "Death by Meeting" culture typical of traditional waterfall project management.

However, many organizations today find themselves trapped in the Agile Paradox.

The paradox is this: a framework intended to streamline communication often results in calendars cluttered with more "syncs," "standups," and "check-ins" than ever before. When implemented without a clear strategy, these Agile ceremonies transform into time-sinking distractions. You have likely heard that the result of this phenomenon: "meeting fatigue," is a leading cause of decreased developer productivity.

The Agile Meeting Cheat Sheet (TL;DR)

If you only have 30 seconds, here is how to fix your meeting culture:

• The Problem: Most Agile teams suffer from "meeting bloat" because their ceremonies lack structure and clear agendas.
• The Solution: Use standardized templates to remove the cognitive load of planning and keep the focus on execution.
• Key Meeting Types:
• Strategy: Use a Roadmap Template to align on quarterly goals.
• Execution: Use Weekly Sprint Templates to maintain a steady shipping rhythm.
• Sync: Use specialized Daily Standups to stay under the 15-minute mark.
• Improvement: Use Retrospectives to fix the process, not just the product.

In the rest of this article, we get into the details of how exactly to get your agile meetings on track, with free templates and tools along the way. Read on to learn more! You can also scroll to end to find out resource table and FAQs.

What are Agile Meetings?

At their core, Agile meetings are structured, time-boxed collaborative sessions designed to facilitate rapid feedback, transparency, and iterative progress. Unlike traditional meetings that often drift without a clear objective, successful Agile ceremonies have specific goals: aligning the team, identifying blockers, or reflecting on performance.

These events are essential for creating a "definition of done" and ensuring that the pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation are upheld.

The Secret to Productivity: Standardized Guardrails

The difference between high-performing Agile teams and ones that are simply "going through the motions" usually comes down to structure.

To maintain velocity, your team shouldn’t just be dealing with a swarm of calendar invites; they need a repeatable and dependable framework. This is where Agile meeting templates become a competitive advantage. By using standardized agendas, you remove the cognitive load of "planning the plan." Your team can now focus entirely on the substance of the work, ensuring that every minute spent in the meeting yields a direct return on investment.

In this guide, we will explore how to effectively implement the full suite of Agile ceremonies—from high-level roadmapping to the daily pulse—and how making and using professional templates can turn your meeting culture from a bottleneck into a powerhouse of productivity.

2. The Foundation: Strategic Roadmap & Planning

In a fast-paced Agile environment, it is incredibly easy for teams to fall into "feature factory" mode: shipping small updates constantly without understanding how they contribute to the bigger picture. Without a high-level strategy, even effective teams can end up moving in the wrong direction.

This is why the Agile Roadmap Meeting is the most critical foundation for any project. While the Daily Standup focuses on the now, the Roadmap focuses on the next and the beyond.

Aligning Vision with Execution

In an Agile framework, an effective roadmap isn't a rigid, multi-year plan like those found in old-school Gantt charts. Instead, it is a living document that outlines the strategic path of a product. Concretely, a product roadmap is a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of your product offering over time.

For this ceremony to be successful, it requires the presence of the Product Owner, who represents the "voice of the customer," and key stakeholders who can provide business context.

Driving Focus with the Roadmap Meeting Template

The primary challenge of a roadmap meeting is staying "big picture." It is tempting for developers to start discussing technical implementation or for marketers to debate specific ad copy that might achieve a specific goal, but staying high-level here is crucial.

Using a Roadmap Meeting Template acts as a strategic filter. It forces the team to answer critical questions:

• What are our key themes for this quarter?
• How do these align with our company-wide KPIs?
• What are the external dependencies or market shifts we need to anticipate?

By formalizing your agenda in a Roadmap Meeting, you ensure that the conversation stays at the strategic level. This clarity filters down through every subsequent ceremony. When every team member knows the "why" behind the roadmap, they are better equipped to make autonomous decisions during the sprint, reducing the need for mid-week course corrections.

The Bridge to Sprint Planning

Once the roadmap is established, it serves as the primary input for Sprint Planning. In this phase, the high-level goals from the roadmap are broken down into actionable backlog items. Without a solid roadmap meeting to start the cycle, sprint planning often becomes a chaotic scramble to find work, rather than a deliberate step toward a major milestone.

3. The Execution Loop: High-Impact Sprint Ceremonies

If the roadmap is your compass, the Sprint is your engine. In Agile methodology, a sprint is a fixed period of time (often one or two weeks) during which specific work must be completed and made ready for review. However, the success of a sprint isn't determined by the code written or the campaigns launched; it’s determined by the effectiveness of the Sprint Ceremony itself.

The purpose of these meetings is to inspect the progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the plan as necessary. Without a rigorous structure, "sprint meetings" can quickly devolve into vague status updates that lack accountability.

Mastering the Weekly Rhythm

For teams operating in high-velocity environments, the Weekly Sprint Meeting is the heartbeat of the operation. This ceremony serves two purposes: it reviews the work finished in the previous week and sets the stage for the next seven days. Though keep in mind that your sprint cycle doesn’t need to be weekly — it just needs to be the length of the sprint that you choose for your team.

To keep this meeting lean, top-performing teams often utilize a Weekly Sprint Meeting Template. This template ensures the team covers:

• The Demo: Quickly showcasing what was "Done" vs. what was "Planned” with a moment to discuss the differences between the two.
• The Pivot: Identifying why certain tasks weren't completed and shifting them back to the backlog or the next sprint.
• The Goal: Defining a central, achievable objective for the upcoming week.

When to Go Deep: The Detailed Sprint Format

Not all sprints are created equal. When a team is tackling a "Big Rock" project—such as a major platform migration or a nationwide product launch—the standard weekly sync may not provide enough granularity.

In these instances, something like a Detailed Weekly Sprint Meeting Template is the superior choice. This version expands the agenda to include deep-dives into resource allocation, cross-departmental dependencies, and risk mitigation strategies. It prevents the "Friday afternoon surprise" where a team realizes a critical task was missed, but keep in mind that these detailed meetings will often take longer and the extra time spent might not be worth it if the complexity of the sprint doesn’t call for it.

The Art of "Time-Boxing"

To keep your meetings focused and efficient, you should also strongly consider implementing time-boxing. The goal is to set a strict time limit for the meeting—usually 60 to 90 minutes for a weekly sprint—and stick to it. Moreover, you should set how long you want to spend on each part of the agenda to keep the meeting as a whole on track.

By using a template, the facilitator can allocate specific "minutes per agenda item," preventing the team from over-analyzing a single point and either running out of time or going far over time. This level of discipline ensures that the "Execution Loop" remains tight, efficient, and productive.

4. The Daily Pulse: Efficient Standups for All Teams

The Daily Standup (or Daily Scrum) is perhaps the most iconic and well known of all Agile ceremonies. It is the heartbeat of the team’s daily operations. However, when poorly executed, it is also draws the most criticism. Without a clear format, these meetings frequently slide into "status reporting" for the manager rather than "synchronizing" for the team and as a result feel like having meetings for the sake of having meetings.

According to research on meeting effectiveness by the Harvard Business Review, the key to a successful daily sync is keeping it short, frequent, and focused on the future rather than the past.

Solving the Hybrid Team Sync

In the modern corporate landscape and the prevalence of remote and hybrid work, the standup serves a dual purpose: it’s a tactical alignment tool and a cultural touchstone.

This approach can also still scale to more complex team structures. For example, for teams spread across time zones, using a consistent template provides a "single source of truth." It ensures that even if a team member misses the live Zoom call, they can look at the meeting notes and immediately understand the state of play.

One Size Does Not Fit All

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is forcing every department into the same standup box. While the "three questions" (What did I do? What will I do? What is blocking me?) are a great start, different roles have different priorities.

• For General Teams: The standard Daily Standup Template is perfect for keeping things lean. If your team feels like they are just "reciting a list," try the Detailed Daily Standup Template, which includes conversation starters designed to surface hidden risks.
• For Developers: Engineering teams need to focus on technical velocity. The Daily Standup Template for Developers shifts the focus toward Pull Request (PR) status, deployment hurdles, and architectural blockers.
• For Marketing: Marketing Agile is about campaign rhythm. The Daily Standup Template for Marketing prioritizes asset approvals, creative deadlines, and real-time market feedback over deep technical tasks.

By tailoring the template to the department, you ensure that the standup remains high-value for everyone in the room.

Avoiding "The Reporting Trap"

To keep your standup 5-10 minutes or less, emphasize that this is a planning meeting, not a problem-solving meeting. If a blocker requires a deep dive, the facilitator should note it and schedule a "parked" discussion immediately following the standup with only the relevant parties. This technique, often called the "16th Minute," keeps the wider team productive while ensuring issues are still resolved.

5. The Feedback Loop: Refinement and Reflection

Agile is not a "set it and forget it" system; it is a philosophy of continuous improvement. This evolution happens in two distinct stages: looking at the work (Refinement) and looking at the team (Retrospective). Without these two ceremonies, teams eventually succumb to "Agile Decay," where processes become sluggish and the backlog becomes a graveyard of irrelevant tasks.

Backlog Grooming: The Art of Refinement

Looking at the work in preparation for completing task is often referred to as Backlog Grooming. The goal is to ensure that the items at the top of your list are "ready" for the next sprint. If a developer picks up a task and has to spend three hours asking questions about the requirements, your refinement process has failed.

The Refinement Meeting Template is designed to prevent this "ambiguity tax." It guides the Product Owner and the team through:

• Decomposition: Breaking large "Epics" into manageable User Stories.
• Estimation: Assigning Story Points or complexity scores to understand effort.
• Definition of Ready: Ensuring every task has clear acceptance criteria before it enters a sprint.

The Retrospective: Protecting Team Health

While Refinement fixes the work, the Retrospective fixes the workflow. The retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.

Too often, "retros" turn into venting sessions without resolution. To avoid this, the Retrospective Meeting Template follows the classic "Start, Stop, Continue" framework. This keeps the conversation constructive and ensures that by the end of the hour, the team has at least one or two actionable "process experiments" to try in the coming week.

Why Both Matter for Productivity

From a management perspective, these meetings are the "preventative maintenance" of your business. By documenting these sessions using consistent templates, you create a historical record of why decisions were made. This is invaluable for onboarding new hires and for leadership to see that the team isn't just busy, but is actively becoming more efficient over time.

6. Showcasing Progress: Building Trust Through Demos

In the world of Agile, transparency is the currency of trust. While internal syncs keep the team aligned, the Sprint Demo (or Sprint Review) is the bridge between the production team and the rest of the organization. This is the moment where "work in progress" transforms into "value delivered."

The goal of a demo is to show the stakeholders exactly what was accomplished during the sprint and gather immediate feedback. It is a critical pivot point: if a feature isn't meeting expectations, it’s better to find out during a 10-minute demo than after a full month of development.

The Power of the "Public" Win

For high-growth companies and early-stage ventures, the Weekly Startup Demo Template is an essential tool for maintaining momentum. These meetings shouldn't just be dry recitations of code commits; they should be high-energy sessions that celebrate wins and visualize progress.

A successful demo using this structured template focuses on:

• The Narrative: Why was this feature built? What user problem does it solve?
• The Live Walkthrough: Moving away from PowerPoint slides and showing the actual, working product.
• The Feedback Loop: Creating a dedicated space for stakeholders to ask questions and suggest refinements for the next product backlog cycle.

Building Stakeholder Confidence

One of the primary benefits of regular demos is the reduction of "stakeholder anxiety." When leadership can see tangible progress every week, they are less likely to micromanage the daily process.

By using a standardized demo template, you ensure that the presentation stays professional and focused. It prevents the team from getting sidetracked by minor bugs and keeps the audience focused on the Definition of Done. This consistency builds a reputation for reliability, proving that your Agile implementation is actually working!

Integration with the Roadmap

The insights gathered during a demo often feed directly back into the Strategic Roadmap we discussed in Section 2. If a demo reveals that a particular feature may be a "hit" with users, the roadmap might be adjusted to prioritize its expansion. This creates a closed-loop system where every meeting serves a specific, interconnected purpose in the business's growth.

7. Common Agile Meeting Mistakes to Avoid (The "Anti-Patterns")

Even with the best intentions, Agile teams often fall into traps that turn productive ceremonies into time-wasting sessions. In governance, these are known as Agile Anti-Patterns. Recognizing these early is key to maintaining a high-performance culture.

In this section we will look into a few common issues and potential solutions for you to try. Project management is a very open-ended problem, so a single solution may not always work, but identifying the precise problem and targeting it with a solution is the first step to resolving the issue and improving your team’s performance.

1. The "Status Report" Standup

The most common mistake in Daily Standups is turning them into a report for the manager. If team members are looking at the Scrum Master instead of each other, you might have a problem.

• The Fix: Use the Daily Standup Template to refocus on the Sprint Goal. The standup is for the team to synchronize their work for the next 24 hours, not for management to audit progress.

2. Death by Meeting (Lack of Time-Boxing)

Agile ceremonies are designed to be "time-boxed." When a retrospective or refinement session bleeds over its allotted time, it creates a ripple effect that affects the team’s Deep Work schedule and lowers morale.

• The Fix: Assign a "timekeeper" role and use structured agendas like the Detailed Weekly Sprint Meeting Template to allocate specific blocks for each topic.

3. Ignoring the "Action Items"

A retrospective that results in a list of complaints without a single owner or deadline is just a venting session. This leads to "Retro Fatigue," where teams stop participating because they don't see any real change.

• The Fix: Every major Agile meeting (such as the Retrospective Meeting) should conclude with at least one "SMART" goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). This goal should be assigned to an owner to ensure that it is followed through on.

4. Backlog Bloat (Skipping Refinement)

Many teams skip refinement to "save time," only to find that their sprint planning takes four hours because the tasks aren't defined. This is a classic case of technical debt in process form.

• The Fix: Schedule regular sessions using the Refinement Meeting Template to ensure stories meet the "Definition of Ready." Depending on your team, you don’t need to make this a standing meeting that may occasionally feel like wasted time; you can schedule refinements as needed, including only the people required to attend.

5. The "Zombie" Demo

If your Sprint Review is just a list of Jira tickets being read aloud, attendees just won’t pay attention.

• The Fix: Use the Weekly Startup Demo Template to focus on value. Show, don't tell. If a feature isn't ready to be shown, discuss the blockers and what the team learned.

By avoiding these pitfalls and leaning on structured templates, you ensure that your Agile implementation remains a "lightweight" framework rather than a heavy administrative burden.

8. The Implementation: Moving from Chaos to Consistency

Implementing Agile meetings isn't a one-time event; it is an ongoing commitment to organizational health. As we have explored, the difference between a team that feels "meeting heavy" and one that feels "highly aligned" is the presence of structure. By utilizing the right templates, you transform your ceremonies from passive check-ins into active drivers of business value.

How to Start: The "Pilot and Pivot" Method

If your company is currently struggling with unorganized meetings, don’t try to overhaul every ceremony overnight. Instead, follow this phased approach:

1. Select one "Pain Point" meeting: Start with the ceremony that feels the most disorganized—usually the Daily Standup or the Retrospective.
2. Introduce the Template: Bring some structure (through a template such as the Daily Standup Template or Retrospective Meeting Template) to the next session.
3. Appoint a Facilitator: Ensure one person is responsible for keeping the team on the agenda and managing the time-box.
4. Gather Feedback: At the end of the week, ask the team: "Did this feel more productive?" Once the team sees the benefit of structured agendas, they will be much more eager to adopt templates for more complex sessions like the Roadmap Meeting or Backlog Refinement.
5. Make Changes!: No two teams are the same, the templates that you’ve seen throughout this article are meant to be general jumping-off points that you can start with, but modify to suite your exact needs.

The Bottom Line: Agile is an Operating System

Like any operating system, your Agile implementation needs regular updates and maintenance to run efficiently. Well-run Agile organizations are able to respond faster to market changes and deliver higher customer satisfaction because they prioritize clarity and speed.

By standardizing your meeting culture, you reduce "context switching" costs, accelerate onboarding for new hires, and create a culture of accountability. You move away from the Agile Paradox and toward a future where meetings are the shortest, most valuable parts of your day.

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Ready to Reclaim Your Calendar?

Don’t let another week go by in "meeting limbo." You can access our full library of Dozens of free, professionally designed templates right now.

Visit the Free Knowtworthy Template Library and start running amazing meetings today!

Quick Reference Table for Effective Agile Meetings

Not every meeting requires the same level of detail. Use this table to select the template that fits your current project phase and team needs. Please note that all of these templates are free and available for use in multiple formats, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions About Agile Meetings

1. What are the 5 main Agile meetings?

The five primary Agile meetings, often referred to as "Scrum Ceremonies," include Sprint Planning, the Daily Standup, the Sprint Review (Demo), the Sprint Retrospective, and Backlog Refinement (Grooming). Each meeting serves a specific purpose in ensuring the team stays aligned and continues to improve their workflow.

2. How long should an Agile Daily Standup last?

A standard Daily Standup should be "time-boxed" to no more than 15 minutes. To keep it efficient, teams should focus on three questions: What was accomplished yesterday, what is planned for today, and are there any blockers? Using a Daily Standup Template helps prevent the discussion from drifting into deep problem-solving.

3. What is the difference between a Sprint Review and a Retrospective?

While both happen at the end of a sprint, they have different goals. The Sprint Review (or Demo) is focused on the product—showing stakeholders what was built and gathering feedback. The Sprint Retrospective is focused on the process—discussing how the team worked together and identifying ways to improve efficiency in the next cycle.

4. How do you run Agile meetings for remote or hybrid teams?

Remote Agile meetings require a "Single Source of Truth." Using digital Agile meeting templates allows all participants to see the agenda and notes in real-time. It is also recommended to use "video-on" policies to maintain engagement and ensure that blockers are clearly documented for those in different time zones. It’s best to cultivate these policies naturally so that team members don’t feel forced to go out of their comfort zone during meetings, but make sure to lead by example and encourage others to engage with both their microphones and cameras.

5. Why is Backlog Refinement important in Agile?

Backlog Refinement (or Grooming) ensures that tasks are clearly defined and estimated before they enter a sprint. This prevents "Sprint Stall," where developers cannot start work because requirements are missing. Regular refinement sessions using a Refinement Meeting Template significantly reduce time spent in Sprint Planning.

Action items come in many different forms — todo’s, tasks, projects, etc. But the idea behind them all is the same: something needs to be completed in order to get closer to a common goal. Think back to your last team meeting; were there any tasks that needed to be achieved, either by you or by someone else present? How were they noted down? Did you leave the meeting with a clear sense of what you needed to accomplish or were there open questions left? In this article, we will look at what action items are, why they are important, and take a detailed look at what makes a good action item. By the end, we’ll bring everything together with a system to help you level up your productivity and always remember what goes into action items ensuring that at all of your future meetings, you always leave with all of the details that you need.

Action items are the most important things to come out of any given meeting and leaving with an incomplete set or with improperly written action items can hinder your productivity both in the short and long term as important pieces of information get forgotten, lost, or have to be revisited. A common example of this is when your team needs to pause or interrupt an otherwise productive meeting for a moment to try and remember a decision that was finalized a few weeks or months ago during a different meeting, but no one can quite remember what that decision was or why it was made. Some people may have taken notes during that meeting and can look back, but the greater issue at hand is that no outcome or associated task was ever assigned to that decision, so no one needed to take ownership of seeing it through, and thus it fell through the cracks.

So, even if great meeting minutes are not taken during every meeting, the bare minimum should be a centralized and visible set of action items that everyone can refer to and work towards completing.

The components of a great action item

Every high-quality action item has three main pieces of information attached to it, that help describe every important aspect of the task. Like puzzle pieces, the three elements fit together, and without any one of the three, the associated action might get lost.

1. Who the item is assigned to

Arguably the most important piece of the puzzle, assigning someone ownership of the action can often be overlooked. In a one-on-one meeting, it might be quite clear who a given task belongs to, but not so much in a larger team meeting. So, before even proceeding to the next step, make sure it is clear who is in charge of seeing the task through.

2. What the action items entail

Once the task has an owner, make sure it is well-defined and has a clear end-goal. It is also a good idea to have the person who was chosen to be responsible for the task to write it down clearly for themselves or - in a more formal meeting setting with someone who is recording the minutes - ensure that the person responsible understands the goals of the task clearly.

For example, you should avoid writing vague tasks such as “look into marketing resources” or “code new features discussed”. These are tasks that might make sense in the current meeting but will lose all meaning as soon as you are out of that context. It pays to be specific here, so “code new features discussed” might turn into “add ‘Sign Up’ button on the home page to help users quickly create an account”. This task is much more specific and can stand on its own, whether you refer to it later that day or months from now.

This a list of specific tasks like this, you can easily tackle them when you next get the chance, without needing to ask for clarification from others and delay progress any further. When all action items are defined like this you’ll end up with a well-oiled machine of team productivity. If you currently have a list of tasks that are not well-defined it may make sense to run a Refinement Meeting to help you get back on track.

3. When it needs to be completed or checked in on

The final important piece of every task is the due date - or check-in date. While it would be nice to just be able to work on every task at a leisurely pace and report on it when it is completely done, the reality is that many projects have tasks that are sequential, one leading to another leading to another. In this reality, it is important to keep track of how long tasks are taking and keep tabs on consistent progress. So, now that you have a well-defined task, the person in charge of the task can assess how long it will likely take to complete, or the group can decide what a good timeline would be for this task’s completion.

A simple example stemming from the “feature” example above is that the button in question should be implemented this week, with the results discussed during the next weekly meeting. The person responsible for this task should also make sure to add their presentation into the agenda for the meeting where this task will be followed up on.

Putting everything together

Taken altogether, we’ve gone over the Who, What, When? framework for putting together action items. If you can answer these three questions when asked about a certain task to the appropriate amount of detail, then every action item you come across in the future will be useful not only as a task to complete, but also as a piece of documentation to help better understand what conclusions were reached during that meeting.

One additional advantage of this framework is that it keeps things simple and straightforward. While having the answers to each part of the “Who, What, When?” framework is critical for every action item, you should also be mindful of how much time defining all three of these should take. Ideally, once you have identified that a task should be completed, answering these three questions can be done in under a minute, so as not to derail the conversation too much. If you do notice that properly defining a given task is taking too long (over 5 minutes) then it likely makes sense to take this conversation offline into a separate meeting with just the people involved in this task.

Keeping Action Items in a Safe Place

Finally, even if you go through all of these steps, all of those best practices will have gone out the door if you end up losing the action item or not being able to access it. For this reason, make sure that you either note down the action items assigned to you and their due dates somewhere you can easily access, or make sure that the meeting minutes are shared with everyone after the meeting.

A great compromise for these alternatives is having your minutes be accessible online through a cloud-based solution that lets you easily share your meeting minutes and action items with other members of your team, keeping everything organized and centralized in the process.

If you keep these simple elements in mind for your future action items, you will hopefully see an improvement in your team’s efficiency overall as you prepare task details up front and remove the need to rehash decisions that were already made in previous meetings. Best of luck!

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In this article, we’re looking at One-on-One meetings and some great questions and agenda items to cover during your next Growth One-on-One either as a manager or direct report.

What is a Growth One-on-One Meeting?

A 1:1 meeting is exactly what it sounds like - a meeting between two people, generally between a manager and a direct report. This meeting can take a few different forms and not every 1:1 is going to be the same. Below are a couple of examples of One-on-One Meetings and what they entail.

1. Weekly or bi-weekly check-in. This kind of meeting is focused on quick progress updates (generally lasting no more than 30 - 45 minutes) where the agenda points are more direct, actionable, and related to current projects or situations.
2. Monthly check-in. Sometimes called a 30-60-90 meeting, this kind of 1:1 focuses on identifying key and desired outcomes over the time course of the next few months.
3. Yearly/long-term check-in. This is the kind of One-on-One we’ll be focusing on in the rest of this article. This sort of meeting is less concerned with smaller roadblocks on current projects and is instead a growth opportunity for both the manager and direct report.

What is the main goal of a One-on-One Meeting?

The main goal of a 1:1 meeting is for both parties to learn from one another and grow together. This growth can be in leadership style for the manager, or in performance or goals for the direct report. Either way, this meeting is a two-way street and benefits most from being an open and honest discussion.

You’ll notice that the questions and discussion points we provide below are oriented towards this ideal.

When should you schedule a One-on-One Meeting?

Though there are different kinds of 1:1 meetings, a yearly one-on-one happens just once a year. Though it doesn’t particularly matter when during the year it is since this kind of one-on-one has less to do with specific deliverables and deadlines and more to do with growth, you may find that you get the most out of this meeting when there aren’t pressing deadlines.

So, you might choose to schedule your yearly 1:1 in slower parts of the year, after large releases or deadlines, or at the beginning of quarters.

How long should a One-on-One Meeting be?

Yearly 1:1 meetings can cover a lot of ground but are more conversational (and less structured) than many other kinds of meetings, so it is generally best to allocate an hour for this kind of meeting. However, keep in mind that time-boxing certain questions in a 1:1 meeting won’t work very well since you don’t want to cut off important points of conversation if you can help it.

If you do schedule an hour-long 1:1 meeting and find that it isn’t enough time, agreeing upon an additional meeting time shortly afterwards can be helpful. Keep in mind that different people may need more or less time for their 1:1 than others!

How is a One-on-One Meeting Run?

One-on-one meetings are meant to be open conversations, but it still helps to have some structure to get the most out of them. In particular, the manager should arrive with a set of questions like the ones we’ll go through below. As you’ll see, some of the questions are tailored to the employee, while others are jumping-off points for the employee to ask the manager any questions that come to mind.

Even though the manager might provide the overarching structure for the meeting, it’s a good idea to ask the other attendee to come prepared with any questions/concerns that they might have. Remember, this is a two-way street!

Additional Resources about One-on-One Meetings

Before we move into our suggested template, here are a few other resources that you might find helpful depending on the kind of 1:1 you are hoping to organize:

• Examples and Guides for One-on-One meetings: Lucid Meetings
• Ideas for collaborative One-on-Ones: Lucidspark
• Several agenda ideas for different kinds of 1:1 Meetings: Small Improvements
• A myriad of potential One-on-One questions to ask: Lighthouse

A Winning Template for One-on-One Meetings

You should always adapt any meeting templates to your particular needs, but below we have some free templates for you to get started with. Every team is different, which is what makes running great meetings a challenge, but meeting best practices often stay the same for different meeting types.

We’ll go over every section in the templates attached to this article and feel free to follow along with any of the template versions we list below.

Microsoft Work Meeting Template:

Microsoft Excel Meeting Template:

Google Docs Meeting Template: Link

Meeting Information

At the top of the template, you should list a few important pieces of information about the current meeting so that anyone can get a good sense of what the meeting is for just at a glance. For a one-on-one meeting this can be very simple, just add who is attending and make sure to keep track of the date of the meeting itself.

Meeting Purpose

Since there are a few different kinds of one-on-one meetings, you may find it helpful to keep track of what this particular meeting is for. For example, in this template’s purpose, we have:

Yearly Meeting to align on current status and future goals and growth opportunities between (Manager’s name) and (Employee’s name).

Meeting Agenda

The actual meeting itself should have a few key phases which we list in the agenda. You can add notes about each agenda item and modify as needed, but we’ve provided a rough baseline for you to work with.

Since one-on-one meetings are also dynamic and should be personalized, feel free to add, modify, or remove any of the items that you think don’t quite fit the tone of the meeting that you are going for. The questions below are tailored towards tightly knit teams, perhaps at smaller organizations and require a lot of honesty from both parties. While this strategy will yield the best results, it can be tricky to navigate in some corporate and formal situations, so keep that in mind when building your template!

In this template, the agenda is broken up into 4 major sections:

1. Role-Related
2. Management
3. Future Plans
4. Actions

This particular set of agenda items is tailored towards managers who are running these meetings, but are useful regardless of your role!

Role-Related Questions

These questions are largely focused on the direct report and their experience working at the company. The next section will be more about feedback on management style and decisions, but don’t forget that these questions are also two-way streets!

1. How would you describe your current role here?

Jobs, especially “Knowledge Work”, can evolve over time based on the company or team’s current needs. The current role that a particular employee is fulfilling may not be exactly what they were hired to do.

So, even though this question seems trivial, it’s good to catch up on how an employee’s role has changed in the past year. If you keep your notes to the one-on-one meetings easily accessible, then comparing how things change over time can also be a valuable asset when considering employees for promotion or career advancement!

2. How would you say you are performing at this role?

There can often be a disconnect between a manager and an employee about job performance. During performance reviews, it can be useful for the employee to get feedback about their contribution to ongoing projects, but it is also very instructive to hear from them directly. If the employee thinks that they are doing well but are, in fact, underachieving, how can this be addressed?

The opposite is also true. Some employees may stress over their deliverables extensively and believe that they are not doing high-quality work when in reality they are performing well. This question can address this divide between expectations and reality in a healthy way.

3. What kinds of tasks are you strongest at? What do you prefer working on the most?

All jobs come with some kinds of tasks that you don’t enjoy doing: Too much paperwork, a flood of constant emails, repetitive tasks, etc. Alongside this work, however, there are tasks that a given person might enjoy completing and takes pride in.

Identifying these tasks and seeing how they match against the current role this person is fulfilling can be a great way to help every employee grow and advance their career. Ideally, you would want a complete match between the job and the person’s interests, and this question gets at that goal.

4. What is an area of your work that you want to improve?

Not meant as a pointed question but rather an opportunity to help, this question aims to elucidate what kind of support the employee might find the most useful. Then you, as the manager, can later find ways to provide that support and help the employee become more proficient at these harder tasks.

5. How could I or the company in general help make you more productive?

Part of being a manager is removing barriers in the way of your direct reports’ productivity. However, it can sometimes be difficult to see exactly what is in the way. In a similar vein to the previous question, this is a great opportunity to hear directly from the employees about what they think hampers them the most.

6. What do you find are the biggest challenges about working remotely?

This question may or may not be relevant to a given employee, but if you are meeting one-on-one with a hybrid or fully remote employee, it is very useful to ask about any challenges they are facing specifically on this front.

Conversely, you may also want to ask about challenges that employees might face returning to the office from being remote. This is a great opportunity to get feedback on the transition and learn about what works best for every employee.

Management

This next set of questions is focused on you, the manager! As we discussed above, these growth 1:1 meetings are meant to help both the manager and the direct report, so this section about what the employee thinks about the team and the company at large can be very useful.

Once again, you’ll need to be open about your experience and this will only be beneficial in a high-trust environment where employees are ready to be honest about their answers.

1. What is something I could do better?

Each of the questions in this section targets something a little bit different, and it is best to start with the general before asking about anything more specific. Though you can ask follow-up questions if you’re interested, this is a good open-ended question to start things off with.

2. What aspects of your work do you want more or less direction from me for?

Diving into the details a bit more, though it might be easiest to manage everyone in a team the same way, it often isn’t the best way to enable employees. This question leaves room for aspects of work that should be guided more or less.

For example, an employee might want more clarity on a project’s purpose before starting. Or, instead, an employee might ask to have a bit more freedom on deliverables so long as all of the main points are hit.

3. What are your thoughts on how I’ve been coming up with direction?

Depending on your style and level of management, this question may make more or less sense to ask. But for smaller companies or higher-up managers at larger firms, coming up and pursuing a particular direction is part of the role.

The employees you work with may have varying opinions about what they think the direction should be, how included they feel in the process, and whether or not they want to contribute more (or less!) to the decision-making process.

4. What are your thoughts on our project management?

This question is a bit more directly targeted at what the employee thinks about how much time they are spending in project management mode versus work mode. Are there too many project management meetings? Are there too few and the employee doesn’t know what to work on? The aggregate answers of your employees will help you get at this answer and adjust accordingly.

5. What would you change?

Closing out this section with a broader view of what the direct report might want to change about the company that they are a part of. Another great opportunity for feedback!

Future Plans

This final section turns back to the employee and their long(er) term goals. In particular, these questions will look into the employee’s goal trajectory and help you gain insight into how their current role fits into this plan.

Feel free to also open up about your answers to each of the following questions and help keep this meeting less like an interview and more like a conversation.

1. Where do you see yourself in 3 years? 10 years?

A pretty common question, but a great one to keep track of every following year during this kind of meeting. Have your employee’s goals changed? What may have driven this change? How can you help them advance their career to where their aspirations lead them?

2. Where do you see the team/company going this year? In 5 years?

Depending on the scope of your team and the size of your company, this question can be adapted to be more useful. As a large company, you may want to scope this specifically to your team or possibly your department. You may also want to ask on the time-scale of quarters instead of years. At a small company or startup, it makes more sense to ask about the company as a whole.

This is a great opportunity to get aligned on the team’s or company’s vision and see what everyone else thinks about its direction.

3. Are you interested in continuing to work at the company long-term? Why or why not?

Though all of the questions in this list require a high level of trust between the manager and employee, this one likely requires the most. In a low-trust situation, you simply won’t get a useful answer, but in a high-trust environment, the answer here can help you reshape the direction of your team to one that performs even better.

Are you at risk of losing key high-performing employees to a competitor because of issues within the organization? Is your team ready to tackle a new major project? This question will help you get at the answer.

Action

Finally, no meeting is complete without action items! Hopefully, this conversation has been very useful for both parties, but logging a few action items (however broad!) can ensure that you make progress on what you’ve discussed.

If you plan on having this kind of meeting once a year, it can also be a great idea to review progress on these action items at the start of the next meeting.

1. Based on what we talked about, what are some things you are going to work on or do from here on out? Similarly, what can I do from here on out?

Though it is generally best to keep action items quite specific, when dealing with broader topics such as career trajectory and work environment, it can be challenging to point to specifics that need to be changed.

If there are specifics that can be done — great! For example, if an employee would prefer to go from fully work-from-home to hybrid, then a manager could simply jot down that they’ll need a desk soon. However, if an employee wants more support on certain kinds of tasks, a more general action item can be written to create a plan to achieve this goal.

After the Meeting

The final thing that you want to do once the meeting ends is store your notes somewhere safe and send them out or share them with the attendees for easy reference later on. We have a separate blog post that goes into detail about the best practices for handling your meeting notes after the meeting is over, which you can view here: Link.

Depending on how you write your notes, you may need to share them over email, or by using a cloud-based meeting platform like Knowtworthy, where you can freely share links to your minutes directly instead of needing to keep people up-to-date manually.

In this post, we covered some of the basics about Growth One-on-One meetings and dove into a solid template for your notes to get you started. But as we mentioned above, there is no one-size-fits-all meeting template! Furthermore, different types of meetings will require different kinds of templates.

So, if you are interested in other free meeting templates, check out the list of articles we’ve written about the subject here: Link. We also host a blog all about meetings and project management best practices which you can check out here: Link.

We’ll be back with more articles like this one soon - so if you found this article helpful, please feel free to subscribe or share the post!

This week we’re looking at Team Cadence Meetings - a kind of team meeting - and how you can use a simple template to quickly improve these meetings. But before we begin, what is a Team Cadence Meeting anyway?

What is a Team Cadence Meeting?

A popular definition for Team Cadence Meetings is any meeting that keeps your team aligned to a particular predetermined goal. These are often repetitive meetings, such as weekly meetings, a daily huddle or standup, or just a regularly scheduled meeting for a given team.

The goal of this kind of team meeting isn’t necessarily to generate new ideas and innovations, but rather to ensure that a team is on track to its goals. Updates and solutions can be shared, but an in-depth discussion is generally left for meetings of a more specialized group so that not everyone on the team is spending their time in a meeting that doesn’t require them.

Though you should always try and keep the length of any given meeting down to a minimum to save everyone on the team time, Team Cadence Meetings will often run about an hour, but shouldn’t exceed 90 minutes. If you find yourself going overtime often, try considering where most of your time is going. Remember, this kind of meeting isn’t about ideation and detailed problem solving, but instead about keeping everyone aligned.

How is a Team Cadence Meeting Run?

Team Cadence Meetings should always be administered by someone who is ‘in charge’ of the meeting and can keep things moving as needed. This can be the team lead or a team member assigned to the role, so long as there is someone moving the meeting along and keeping an eye on the clock and the agenda.

Put succinctly, a team cadence meeting is about keeping a team on track and progress visible, not about making large shifts in goals.

Additional resources about Team Cadence Meetings can be found here: Link

A Simple Template for Team Meetings

You should always adapt any meeting templates to your particular needs, but below we have some free templates for you to get started with. Every team is different, which is what makes running great meetings a challenge, but meeting best practices often stay the same for different meeting types.

We’ll go over every section in the templates attached in this article and feel free to follow along with any of the template versions we list below.

Microsoft Work Meeting Template:

Microsoft Excel Meeting Template:

Google Docs Meeting Template: Direct Link

Meeting Information

At the top of the template, you should list a few important pieces of information about the current meeting so that anyone can get a good sense of what the meeting is for at a glance. In particular, you might want to add the team in the meeting title instead of keeping things generic.

Meeting Purpose

A meeting’s purpose can stay consistent across several meetings, but bits of it can be updated to be relevant to a particular week. For example, in this template’s purpose, we have:

Catching up on progress in the past week, discussing setbacks, updating timelines and expectations. By the end of the meeting, everyone should know how the team is progressing to its goals.

However, depending on the current week’s goals, you might update this to something like:

Discussing updates on the new sales pipeline, updating timelines and expectations for delivery. By the end of the meeting, everyone should have a good idea of what the final sales experience should look like.

Meeting Agenda

The actual meeting itself should have a few key phases which we list in the agenda. You can add notes about each agenda item and modify how much time you think each will take as needed, but we’ve provided a rough baseline for you to work with.

Welcome

These 5 minutes are built in for everyone to arrive and to get everyone on track. Let everyone know what the goals of this meeting are and get going right away.

Announcements

Before switching to the body of the meeting, take an intermediary step of noting any announcements relevant to the team. For example, you could mention if there are any changes to the schedule in the next couple of weeks. This should also only take 5 minutes at most.

Team Updates

This is where most of the meeting time should be spent. During the team updates section, go around to every member of the team with an update and have them share their progress, setbacks, and updates. Remember, don’t get too caught up in each individual set of updates. If comments are needed on something specific, a few brief notes are okay, but a separate meeting should be scheduled if an in-depth review is needed.

How long this part of your meeting depends on how many people are providing updates, so feel free to alter the length as needed.

Action Items and Priorities

Arguably the most important part of the meeting is where you’ll define the action items that need to be completed for next week. Make sure that you always leave at least 10 minutes for this section and ensure that everyone is aligned.

Writing out the action items and who is responsible is crucial to ensure forward momentum.

Closing

In the final five minutes of the meeting, you can wrap up and see if anyone has any lingering questions, end early, or use this time as overflow from the action items and priorities section.

After the Meeting

The final thing that you want to do once the meeting ends is store your notes somewhere safe and send them out or share them with your teammates, so that everyone can easily look back on what happened during this meeting in the future if needed, instead of needing to ask other about outcomes. We have an entirely separate blog post that goes into detail about this here: Link.

You can use these minutes to clue in people who couldn’t make it to the meeting or new team members who might want to get quickly caught up on what the team has been progressing on recently.

Depending on how you write your notes, you may need to share them over email, or by using a cloud-based meeting platform like Knowtworthy you can freely share links to your minutes directly instead of needing to keep people up-to-date manually.

Coming to meetings without preparing in advance is such a common occurrence that we barely bat an eye anymore when it happens. And yet, we’ve all felt the difference between meetings with a set agenda that run smoothly through all the items and produce a concrete list of action items, and those that meander around to topics as attendees recall them.

Though the margin of productivity between those two kinds of meetings is significant, the amount of time it takes to prepare for any given meeting and transform it from a useless one to a useful one is only a few minutes. We’ve talked about quick meeting preparation before, but here we’ll look at the major pillars of meeting preparation and how you can optimize your workflow to save you hours every week.

Step 1: The Agenda

Your meeting agenda is easily the most important step in your meeting preparation. Think back to your most recent team meeting and see if you can answer the following five questions:

1. Did you come prepared with an agenda, or review an agenda sent out by someone else in advance?
2. If there was an agenda, how did it affect the meeting’s structure?
3. How long did it take to create or review the agenda?
4. If there was no agenda, how do you think an agenda would have altered the meeting?
5. Would the added structure of a concrete agenda be useful or detrimental?

It is rare to come into a meeting having no idea what to expect. Even with disorganized meetings, you can usually guess roughly the topics of discussion based on previous meetings or by knowing who scheduled it. This can trick attendees into thinking that everyone is on the same page even when no agenda has been sent out.

The issues arise when not everyone present at the meeting has the same idea about what should be covered. If there are conflicting opinions on what needs to be discussed, your meeting might hop from topic to topic or you might run overtime trying to cover everything. Alternatively, you might find that you’ve spent the majority of your time on the items your coworkers wanted to discuss before you spoke up and mentioned the topics you were interested in addressing — leaving too little time to give your topics the consideration they needed.

We cover time-boxing at length in a different article, but before your next meeting, spend two or three minutes jotting down what you hope to cover during the meeting. Here’s a simple agenda template that you might use for your next meeting:

You can access this free template here, where you'll find a free and fully customizable online template along with free access to a Microsoft Word version of this template, an Excel version, and a Google Docs version as well.

This template is super simple and quick to complete, allowing you to spend more time focusing on your work while keeping your next meeting on track. However, if you want to make the most of your time preparing for meetings, there are a few more elements that you need to think about before considering your meeting prep done!

Check out a free agenda template that fits your meeting:
Daily Standup Template: View Template
Growth One-on-One Template: View Template
Refinement Meeting Template: View Template
Project Kickoff Team Meeting Template: View Template
Simple Board Meeting Template: View Template

We also have a whole set of free meeting templates for all kinds of meetings that you can access here: knowtworthy.com/templates and a guide for making the most of them on our "Ultimate Guide to Boosting Team Productivity with Templates" article

Step 2: Review Previous Action Items

As we discussed above, if you have a meeting on your calendar, even if there isn’t an agenda at the moment, you might have a rough idea about what you’ll be talking about regardless. Previous action items are a common way to guess what likely happened since the last meeting and thus what should be mentioned this time around.

If any tasks were assigned to you last time, then you probably recorded them in your personal productivity system and can discuss updates next time around. However, do you know the status of any of the tasks that were assigned to others during a previous meeting? Keeping track of action items, even those that you aren’t responsible for can provide you with a solid baseline from which to write your agenda for the next meeting.

For example, a common but overly simple agenda item that people write is something like “Review progress from last week”. While this is certainly better than no agenda after all, there really isn’t much information on what actually has to be discussed, or how long that discussion will take. Is there only one item that has any progress? Will this whole update just take a couple of minutes? Or were there a substantial number of action items that need to be reviewed one by one for comments?

Now, if instead, you have the list of action items from a previous meeting, you can easily digest this general agenda item into a few more specific ones and roughly guess how long each will take.

For instance:

1. Review progress from last week

Can now become something like:

1. Review new figures that Ben prepared (5 minutes)
2. Discuss Anne’s new marketing proofs (10 minutes)
3. Decide which vendor to go with based on Peter’s info (15 minutes)

And just like that, the first 30 minutes of your next meeting is planned out and you’ll have a good sense of what to expect and what the outcomes might be - which flows into the next step of preparation.

Step 3: Draft the Expected Outcomes

Whereas your agenda will state what it is you’ll be spending time on during your meeting, a crucial aspect of your preparation is what you hope to accomplish during the meeting itself. You don’t have to have specifics nailed down at this point — after all, if you already knew the meeting’s outcome why meet at all? Instead, try to outline what it is you think should definitely be addressed and what feedback is important.

Going back to our example in Step 2, say that Ben’s figures will both provide helpful information to your team about current business performance, but will also eventually need to become public as well. You might quickly look over the new information and discuss how it impacts your business trajectory, but a second expected outcome is that you also think about whether or not they are polished enough to release publicly or if some reformatting should be done.

Once you have a few expected outcomes, you can add them under their relevant agenda items in the template that we shared above. Also, please note that if you aren’t sure about the expected outcomes for a particular agenda item, try to reach out to the person in charge of it before the meeting and see what they think! This is a great way to show initiative and ensure that your time estimates for each item are appropriate.

Step 4: Invite the right people

Next up is a quick and easy step, but one that you should think about a bit before every meeting. It is very easy to get caught up in the loop that everyone on your team should be present at certain project meetings, even when only a few members are directly involved in the current stage of the project.

Don’t forget that meetings are very costly and having everyone present “just in case” can hinder your team’s productivity overall. So, the next time you schedule a meeting, look over the agenda and see who the key players in that meeting are going to be. Furthermore, if possible, make sure that potential attendees know that they can decline the meeting if they don’t see themselves contributing meaningfully and their time would be better spent working.

Step 5: Share your agenda

Finally, we recommend you share your agenda with your colleagues before the meeting actually happens, to prevent any conflicts in what needs to be covered. We covered a few of the reasons why this is important above, but with how easy it is to share documents online, sending around your meeting agenda beforehand is a quick way to get valuable feedback.

One way to share your agendas quickly while keeping them collaborative is to use a shareable solution out of the box. We’ve already included a Google Drive meeting template above, but there’s also a free cloud-based solution to get you started: here. Simply click “Start a Meeting”, add your agenda, attach the link to your meeting’s calendar invite, and all of your other attendees will be able to collaboratively edit the agenda, meeting minutes, and action items.

That’s all for this post! If you’re interested in more meeting best practices to keep you on top of your workplace productivity, check out some of our other posts here.

Batching your work as a means to increase productivity has been popular advice for a long time. The idea is simple: humans are not great multitaskers, and switching between many tasks at a given time can result in a “switch cost” that wastes time you may not even notice. As a general rule, the research recommends sticking to a particular task for a while before moving on to the next if you want to maximize your productivity. As opposed to rapidly flicking back and forth between two or more different tasks and losing time along the way.

But batching isn’t just about working on one thing at a time. At its core, batching is the practice of grouping similar tasks together and then completing them in - you guessed it - batches. A well-known example of similar tasks that can be accomplished together in a single batch is email. How wide or narrow you want to be with your definition of what fits into a batch of tasks is up to you, but it is good practice to group tasks in a way you feel comfortable switching from one to another.

Knowing what can be batched together

There are no hard and fast rules that define these batches and they can be quite general. For example, in his book Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that the most important split you can make is between work that requires long stretches of uninterrupted focus, and simple, repetitive tasks that can be completed at any time. A common example of deep work is theorizing a solution to a complex problem. Without sitting down and focusing for some time with all of the information you need to address the problem, you won’t arrive at a great solution. In the world of software development, it often makes sense to think about the structure and expected function of a feature implementation before getting started. Similarly, an example of shallow work is something like formatting a presentation or document. It’s a task that you have to get done, but it isn’t all that cognitively challenging. So long as you don’t interleave deep and shallow work, and instead group tasks by type and work on each group separately, you can increase your productivity and output overall.

What does batching have to do with meetings?

But how does the idea of batching relate to meetings, and why does it matter when you meet with your team(s)? Meetings, like any other tasks on your to-do list, all suffer from the “switch cost” mentioned above. In particular, most meetings can be classified as “shallow work” and having meetings distributed across your day at random intervals can impede your ability to focus on “deep” problems. Let’s take a look at some examples of weekly calendars to get a better idea of how exactly meetings can impact your most productive states.

In the image to the left, meetings are dropped haphazardly throughout the week - some events in the morning, some in the afternoon, at varying lengths and varying intervals, while the image on the right shows a batched approach. Notice that the same number of meetings and meeting hours are used in both calendars. There’s a point to be made about reducing the amount of time you spend in meetings in the first place, but that’s a topic for a different article.

So what improvement does the calendar on the right have against the calendar on the left? You’d still be spending the same amount of time in meetings during the week, so wouldn’t you have the same amount of time for the rest of your work? Well, through this batching you can actually optimize the “switch cost” of tasks by leveraging the built-in context switching that you already do in meetings. In a perfectly efficient world, as soon as you enter a meeting, you’d get right to a set agenda and talk about items that you have everything prepared for ahead of time - losing no time in the process. In reality, the first several minutes of most meetings are occupied by small talk, waiting on peers to join, or getting equipment set up if there’s a presentation involved. And this isn’t entirely wasted time either. It takes a few minutes to get into the right headspace for a particular meeting, to review any notes you may have brought with you and to ensure that you are ready to contribute the most you can.

The main point, however, is that scheduling meetings closer together lets you get rid of time wasted on the “switch cost” and gain that time back for longer, more focused periods of time. Concretely, take a look at the image below where we highlighted the amount of time you can spend focused during the week, accounting for a 15-minute switch time between tasks.

To illustrate the impact of batching more clearly, we ignored lunch breaks for simplicity (but please make sure to budget these into your schedule!) and laid out a ‘best-case’ scenario for the calendar on the left, where it takes 15 minutes to switch from a meeting to focused work, and no time at all to switch from focused work to the next meeting. Finally, a “Focused Work” session would only be added when 30 minutes or more could be spent uninterrupted doing work. While work can be completed in the short breaks present between meetings, there isn’t enough time to focus deeply on challenging tasks.

In the calendar on the left, the longest period of time you have for a single session of focused work is just over 2 hours long. While on the right, we have effectively two entire days available to get work done, uninterrupted. Notice again that even though all of the meetings remain on both calendars, the batched calendar on the right materialized over an hour of free time to get work done every week!

But your work and calendar are never going to be that simple. You don’t really have control over all of your meeting times, and recurring daily meetings (like a daily standup) can’t all be stacked into a single day. So how do you actually abide by the principles of batching in the real world? Let’s keep the general theory in mind and look at a few steps you can take and strategies you can work with to batch your meetings to whatever extent possible and win back some true productivity!

How to batch your meetings

The steps below are ordered for your convenience but feel free to pick and choose how you would like to apply them. Everyone’s calendar is different, so do what works best for you!

Identify the meetings you can’t move

In a perfect world, you’d have complete control over your calendar and could set your meetings whenever you want them to happen. But when meeting with groups of people, everyone is going to have different constraints and additional commitments, often making intersecting time sparse. As a result, you’ll have events in your calendar that you really can’t control. Something like an all-hands meeting, for example, almost certainly can’t be moved just because you would like to batch your meetings more closely. So the first goal is then to identify which meetings you can’t move. These will be your pillars or the meetings that you can batch around.

While some meetings can’t be moved, make sure you are doing your best to identify the ones that truly cannot be moved. If you have a meeting with a few coworkers you interact with regularly, you may well be able to ask them to move it to a different time that works for everyone without much issue. Keep in mind that this exercise won’t work if you simply identify all of your meetings as pillars!

Identify the meetings that you can move

Once you’ve found the immovable meetings, comb through your calendar another time and take note of the meetings you can try to move. If you’re on the fence about any, factors to keep in mind are:

• how difficult was it to find a meeting time that worked for everyone the first time around?
• how many people are in the meeting? Asking the other attendee in a one-on-one to move the meeting is generally easy, but a meeting with 8+ attendees can be much more difficult to move.

As you’ll see in the later steps, it is totally normal to have a set of meetings you can’t move, so don’t feel pressured to move everything around. You may even find that some of your moveable meetings become pillars as well, so don’t feel the need to try and move everything.

Bonus: Identify the meetings you can remove

A great way to increase the amount of time you can spend focused on your work is by simply reducing the number of meetings you have to attend. There are a number of strategies to employ that might help you figure out which meetings you can skip or remove yourself from, and we go into more detail in our article on the dangers of weekly meetings.

Simply put, ask yourself if you are really deriving value from a meeting either through your contribution or your attendance, and if you aren’t then see if you can simply not attend. Your coworkers and managers are also interested in you staying productive, so if you can make a case for why you shouldn’t be at a meeting, then you’ll likely be able to step back from it.

Organizing your calendar

Once you have your list of meetings for a given week ready to go, start by arranging the meetings that you can’t move on a clean calendar. You’ll want to create a few groups of meetings throughout the week and move from a more dispersed calendar to a more consolidated one. In the calendar below, notice the few ‘seeds’ we planted to add meetings around based on the immovable meetings selected previously, as well as moveable ones that still happen during good times.

Now, go ahead and play around with adding the remaining meetings around the ones above. In the end, you might end up with a calendar that looks kind of like the one below.

Once you have a rough idea of your calendar, you can go ahead and see if the meetings you moved can be rescheduled or not. If it turns out that some of the meetings you thought you would be able to change couldn’t be moved after all, work backwards with a new ‘pillar’ meeting. It’s also a good idea to provide a few options to your team members when rescheduling instead of requesting a specific time, if possible.

At this point, you likely have a calendar that works! You’ve freed up time every week to focus on what matters and still attend every meeting you need to. Well done!

However, before we wrap up there are some additional considerations you may want to consider when creating your new schedule, and we’ll look at them below.

Know your (time) limits

Batching your meetings can be an excellent strategy to free up time every week, but there are limits to this strategy. For example, if you stretch this strategy to its logical conclusion, then placing all of your meetings on a single day or two, back-to-back-to-back would result in the most time saved. Imagine that - 3 completely empty days per week for you to do your work with only one day of meetings!

However, even if that were possible with your calendar, would you actually be able to meaningfully contribute to each meeting throughout that day, or would 8+ hours of uninterrupted meeting time leave you burnt out on the subsequent days?

As a result, it’s important that you gauge the limit of how many meetings you can batch or have during a single day. If you aren’t sure, it’s best to start small and see if you can free up even a single day with no meetings, or at least a day with a long stretch of uninterrupted time. While that may just be the start, companies like Shopify have reported success in implementing “No Meeting Wednesdays”, for example. Try suggesting a few options to your colleagues and see what sort of plan works for everyone.

With all of these tools and considerations in mind, go ahead and try the exercise of reworking your calendar to see how much time batching your meetings can open up for you!

Depending on your line of work, keeping minutes during all of your meetings might be among the most important actions you take. We’ve all experienced what it’s like to know that you’ve discussed an important point at a previous meeting but are unable to remember what the outcome was. You could reach out to the other attendees and see if they remember, but is it really worth bugging them about this?

Taking good meeting notes - or minutes - is the solution to these lapses in memory. Even though it feels like extra work in the moment, taking good notes during your meetings can end up saving you hours of time that could have otherwise been spent productively. Simply having a trusted source of truth for decisions that were made during a given meeting can take a lot of pressure off of your work when second-guessing yourself before an important presentation or demo.

There are a lot of articles out there that list all of the things you should try to keep track of in your meetings. Diving into the details and intricacies of excellent meeting notes is for a future article but the gist is as we mentioned above:

1. Capture the points discussed
2. Identify the decisions
3. Specify the next steps

So, after you start taking diligent meeting notes, you’re all set right? While the notes are valuable in-and-of themselves, there are a few extra steps that you can take to add substantial value to both your own work and the work of your team as a whole.

In the rest of this article, we’ll take a look at the differences between writing and storing notes for your own use versus how you should write and store notes to benefit your entire team.

Taking meeting notes for yourself vs. others

Taking notes when you know nobody else but you will look at them is always easier than keeping things formal enough for your coworkers as well. When writing out your own thoughts, you can take shortcuts by using acronyms and symbols only you are familiar with, or only writing down the bits of information that you find important to your own projects as opposed to taking notes on everything that happened during that meeting. You can also freely note your own thoughts or jot down questions that you are thinking about but don’t want to interrupt the meeting with. Finally, you don’t have to go through the hassle of figuring out a way to get your notes in the hands of your teammates. You can just store them somewhere you can access and that’s that.

Even though it does take a bit of extra effort to clean things up enough to share with your teammates, we’ll argue that it is worth keeping your notes to a higher standard even if you are sure that you’ll never end up sharing them with others. But as you’ll see later on, sharing meeting notes with your team can even turn into a superpower instead of a time sink.

Concretely, let’s address the points we just mentioned above for why writing meeting notes for yourself is so much easier and see if we can fill in the gaps with a few simple tips.

1) You can take shortcuts and use acronyms or symbols to write faster.

Everyone’s notes look a bit different and part of the reason why is how we choose to condense information when in a fast-paced environment. Some people might only write in bullet points and capture the main ideas, others might use acronyms to shorten long words. Regardless of your strategy, you can take a few small steps to ensure your notes are always interpretable by others as well.

One strategy is to ‘clean up’ your minutes after a given meeting and format points clearly, remove obfuscated acronyms and symbols, and generally polish up the document. One could also argue that this task helps better remember what went on in the meeting by reviewing it an additional time. In an ideal world, it would be great if everyone had the opportunity to review every set of meeting notes, but the reality is that it is unlikely that you’ll be able to make time and polish your notes regularly.

With this in mind, another strategy is to provide a ‘legend’ of sorts to accompany your notes. For example, if you use exclamation points in your notes to denote something important like you see below:

• (!) The new software release goes live next week

You might just add a note at the top of your minutes saying that “Exclamation points denote crucial information” to help other readers quickly catch on to your style of notes.

2) You only write the notes relevant to you.

This is quite common and it logically makes sense that you would only note the points discussed that you will actually need to remember later on. However, this approach will certainly limit the usefulness of your notes to others, since everyone has a slightly different definition of what they consider to be useful.

One approach here is to try your best to be more thorough and write notes about every major point discussed. This requires more effort during the meeting itself and it can be challenging to know if the notes you are taking for topics you aren’t the expert in make sense or capture every important nuance.

Instead, you might try a more collaborative approach to meeting notes where everyone either contributes to a central shared document or people take their own individual notes pertaining to a specific agenda item that are compiled after the fact. You may find that having everyone just add notes directly to a document in real-time will save everyone the most time since you can already see who wrote what before adding your own notes. We’ll go into some more detail about this strategy further on in the article!

3) You can freely write your own thoughts without worrying about what your team members might think.

There’s an added layer of stress when creating meeting notes that you know will be shared with your professional colleagues. What if you missed an important point or misrecorded something? When worrying about these flaws, your instinct might be to just keep your notes to yourself to prevent any of these issues from becoming a reality, even if keeping your notes isolated could cost your team productivity.

Our counter-argument to that is if you write down questions you might have or things you weren’t certain about during the meeting, it is actually an opportunity for constructive feedback from your team members. Someone else might know the answer to a question you didn’t want to vocalize during the meeting, or your colleague might remember a few extra details about a certain meeting point. With this context, it may very well benefit your entire team to share your notes, even if you don’t initially feel very comfortable doing so. If you use software that lets you share and edit your notes with coworkers, then breaking down this barrier is even easier!

4) You don’t have to go through the hassle of sharing your notes after every meeting.

This is a pretty large blocker to a more fluid communication of information, and feeds into what we might describe as the “Best Practices for Storing Meeting Notes”. Even though it takes a bit of setup to get going, sharing your minutes can be automated almost entirely, and we’ll look at why the opportunity cost is worth it in the remainder of this article.

If you don’t have any processes set up around sharing your notes, the actual steps might look something like this:

1. Writing your meeting notes in your personal notebook at work.
2. Finding the time to sit down and transcribe the notes into a digital document.
3. Polishing up your notes, and adding the related information (like date, purpose, and possibly additional formalities such as attendees or location)
4. Sending out an email or message to everyone on the meeting or team who might find these notes useful.
5. Uploading the notes to a central company location and ‘filing’ them away.

Each of these steps take time, and even if you take your notes on your computer, you still have to go through steps 3-5 every time anyway. In an ideal world, it would be nice to always be able to go back and review detailed meeting notes from any team’s meetings in the past to check on decisions, progress, or any other pertinent details. With the following tips, let’s look at how we can minimize the effort needed for excellent, shareable notes.

Tip #1: Keep your meeting notes digital

This might seem a bit controversial given some sources out there recommend you always take notes with a pen and paper after a popular study found that students could retain information better when writing with pen and paper as opposed to using laptops or tablets to write.

While this may be true in a classroom setting, taking notes at a meeting isn’t a task demanding that you rapidly synthesize and retain information - that’s a useful skill to have in a lecture hall, not a meeting room. Capturing important information quickly and accurately is arguably more important than generating a deep understanding of this information in the moment. For that reason, we recommend that you stick to your keyboard whenever possible.

In some meetings where no one else has their laptops out it may come off strange if you are the only one tapping away, but with modern meetings often being either hybrid or making use of projected presentation or other digital media anyway, it is generally okay to take notes on a computer. Besides, if anyone asks why you have your laptop out, they’ll likely be happy to hear that you’re taking notes that you plan to share after the meeting!

Keeping your notes entirely digital not only unlocks the ability to search through them easily later on but will also make the next steps much simpler.

Bonus Tip: Record your meeting audio

This isn’t included as a full tip because it’s often easier said than done to record a meeting. Though automatically transcribing the audio after the meeting can be very useful and mitigate the amount of important information that slips through the cracks, you should always make sure that everyone is comfortable with the meeting being recorded, whether they are calling in remotely or in person. And unless you have a team culture of recording meetings for the sake of compliance or utility, it can be challenging to start every meeting off by asking people if it is okay to record them.

Tip #2: Use a template!

This is a simple tip that can pay dividends down the line. There isn’t much to explain but the main point is that you should find (or create!) a template for your meetings that you like, and stick to it for all of your meetings. You may also elect to have a slightly different template depending on what team you are meeting with, but once you settle on a template that works, you can both copy and paste consistent information between meetings, and always remember to fill out critical information.

We have an entire post dedicated to meeting templates that you can take a look at if you’d like some free options or ideas to get started.

Tip #3: Collaborate on your meeting notes

Collaborating on your meeting notes with team members can be difficult to get started but we’ve seen it work wonders not only for generating quality notes, but also for improving everyone’s understanding of the meeting’s subject material.

Collaborative notes can take a few forms, but the most common strategy is to create a meeting document either on a Google Doc or another real-time note-sharing service and ensure that all meeting attendees have access to edit the document. You can then add a few of the main agenda points before the meeting starts and let people take notes whenever they want to add something to the document.

This way, if you are unsure about something in your notes, simply place the question in the document with a question mark and an annotation and see if someone adds relevant information on their own, or wait until it makes sense to pose the question out loud during the meeting. Often times you won’t be the only one with this question, so it helps everyone out!

A potential roadblock you might face with getting everyone to collaborate on taking notes is that if you just share a blank sheet with everyone, people might not want to start, or won’t know where to start. This is another reason why maintaining a solid meeting template is such a good investment as it makes note-taking straightforward for everyone involved.

Tip #4: Link your notes to calendar invites

The final tip we’ll share here will help you manage and quickly find the notes from any meeting, before or afterwards. Simply take the document link from your collaborative or shared minutes from the previous tip and add it to the comments of the related meeting. This way, everyone who is invited to the meeting can just click on that link when the meeting begins and have direct access to the collaborative notes. Furthermore, this is a great way to crowdsource the agenda for a particular meeting as well.

A strategy that works well here is to write out the portion of the agenda that you know will be discussed and then ask your coworkers about adding in any items that they would also like to discuss or feel you have missed. You can then review the collective agenda before the meeting to have a more complete picture of what it is you will be discussing.

Adding the meeting minutes link to your calendar invites is also a great way to keep track of the notes themselves. Now, if you ever need to review some information discussed in that meeting you had two weeks ago, you can simply flip through your calendar and grab the link that way.

And there you have it! Follow a few tips that, once put into practice, can substantially improve both your meeting experience and productivity after the fact. You’ll always have the information that you need at your fingertips and so will your team members!

If you found this article interesting at all, drop us a follow - we really appreciate it and we post regularly about business productivity and how you can optimize your professional performance with proven tips.

Though there are many different kinds of meetings, the meetings where you aim to get aligned with your team about the status of a certain goal are some of the most common, and can be the most lengthy overall. But why is this?

Think back to a recent project management meeting you had with your entire team. How organized was the meeting? Did everyone contribute? Was everyone efficient about discussing their progress, or was the meeting derailed at any point with members getting caught up in the details for any given topic? Did the meeting run on time, or was it longer than expected?

It’s easy to lose track of time in a planning meeting where everyone has the opportunity to contribute their thoughts to current problems the team is facing. While this can be incredibly useful as new and valuable ideas might be suggested, does everyone on the team really need to be there to strategize about every step toward your common goal?

The pitfalls of getting too detailed in your meetings

Let’s take a look at a more concrete example of how you might want to run an efficient project management meeting. Ideally, such a meeting would run by everyone providing a short presentation on their progress, noting what has been completed, what is left to complete, and what issues have been encountered. All of these points should be kept high-level, so that other teammates and stakeholders who didn’t directly work on these tasks still have a coarse (but accurate!) idea about what is going on, allowing the team to be directed appropriately.

Let’s take a look at a visual representation of how project management meetings might be structured. In the image above, each column represents one particular task, or portion of a project. High-level points are outlined at the top, while in-depth points are at the bottom. An example of a high-level point in a software development context might be something like “Creating a check-out flow” for an e-commerce page. The lower down you go in the column, the more specific the tasks or points become. In the same example, the lowest level task might be to “automatically populate coupon codes to a user’s cart.

So while you can pass vertically from one level of depth to another, you’ll see that if for every agenda item that needs to be covered at your meeting, you go through every single level of depth for every single point, the meeting would need to cover way more content than one that just passes from one point to the next at a high level.

In some cases it might not be detrimental to go deep on every topic as passing through every level of depth would keep everyone on your team maximally informed. But in the majority of cases, does everyone actually need to understand all of this minutiae? Does someone like the product manager really need to know about a developer’s struggle with populating coupon codes during every meeting? Hopefully not!

With the goal of efficient meetings in mind, let’s look into a different strategy for refining discussion items in your meetings to help your project management meetings run more effectively so that you can spend time only on what is critical and glean the most from your team’s combined knowledge.

What are refinement meetings?

Refinement meetings are generally undertaken by Agile teams using the SCRUM methodology, and though there is a definition provided for what refinement is and what they are for, you don’t need to adhere to a SCRUM or Agile methodology to make the most of this process. Let’s take a look at the definition first and then see how we can generalize it.

Refinement is the act of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller more precise items. This is an ongoing activity to add details, such as a description, order, and size. Attributes often vary with the domain of work. SOURCE

Refinement meetings also fit into an Agile sprint cycle by happening before new task planning, in a loop like the one you see below.

Logically, it is important to make sure tasks are properly defined before you can estimate how long they might take to complete and assign them to team members. Similarly, problems encountered should be digested by a team before they are presented to the group.

How refinements save you time

While a refinement meeting may seem like yet another meeting that you have to add to your already busy schedule, if done correctly, it can save your team time as a whole, because only a subset of the group needs to attend.

Referring back to our e-commerce example above, you don’t need the entire team to diagnose why one developer is having trouble with adding coupons to the check-out flow. Instead, it makes more sense to set up a meeting between that developer and one or two colleagues to come up with some potential solutions before the next sync or project management meeting with the whole team. Note that the project manager does not need to attend every single one of these meetings either! The refinements should be kept as atomic as possible to make sure that the team as a whole is using time optimally.

This way, the conversation during the project management meeting can stick to the high-level points of each task so that even when the issues surrounding a particular task are mentioned, the context wouldn’t be to ask for help or opinions on fixes. Instead, the problem encountered can be mentioned in the context of the solutions already hashed out.

Depending on the size of your team or the scope of a certain task, you may encounter questions where it does actually make sense to ask the entire team a certain question to hear everyone’s opinion. In this case, it doesn’t make sense to schedule an entirely separate meeting. Though make sure you truly do have a question for everyone before posing it, lest you default back to examining progress at every level of specificity as we cautioned against in the images above.

Now that you have some idea of the value of atomic refinements, let’s move on to what it takes to actually run high-quality refinement meetings.

Running a refinement meeting

There are other guides that look at how SCRUM-compliant refinement meetings should be run, but in the remainder of this article, we’ll review some more relaxed guidelines that will help you make the most of everyone’s time without needing to stick to a strict set of rules.

Which tasks need refining?

The first question you might have is: which tasks — of the myriad that need to be completed — actually need refinement? It’s true that if you spend time trying to revise every single task that your team needs to complete, you’ll end up spending more time in meetings than actually working!

So, a good way to determine if a task needs refining is to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are the steps to completing this task clear?
2. Is this task manageable for a single team member?
3. Is this task routine or have very similar tasks been completed before?

If you answered “Yes” to all three of the questions above, then great! This task likely doesn’t need refinement. The main idea being that so long as a task is clear, team members won’t need to delve into a discussion during the planning meeting. Furthermore, if a single person can complete the task (even if it needs to be a specific team member) you can overlook some of the clarity required for the other questions since the entire team does not necessarily need to be apprised of every minor task detail.

However, if you answered “No” to any of the three, it is likely a good idea to schedule a refinement meeting to ensure you have a well-thought-out task before assigning it to one or more team members. We’ll take a look at what that would involve below.

When to schedule a refinement meeting and how long should they be?

While some articles label refinement meetings as recurring meetings with many members, a more general approach shouldn’t have a set time for refinements at all. In fact, setting a recurring refinement meeting of fixed length should be avoided if at all possible!

Since the purpose of this type of meeting is to shore up any points of confusion about certain tasks, not only should a refinement meeting be scheduled exclusively when there are tasks that require further investigation, but the length of the meeting itself should be determined by how many tasks there are to go over. Though every case is different, we recommend that you time-box every discussion item beforehand and schedule accordingly.

For example, we try to allocate 15 minutes per item for refinement when necessary, and on weeks where only two items need to be discussed, we’ll meet for 30 minutes in total. If you find that you have dozens of items to cover during a particularly long planning week, we recommend that you split these up so that your individual meetings are no longer than 90 minutes - though some would argue that keeping things to 45 minutes or less is preferred.

Once you know how long your meeting is going to be and what items will be discussed, let’s look at who should be invited to these meetings to ensure that you are using your team’s time as efficiently as possible.

Who should be invited?

The answer to this question is rather intuitive, but make sure you are always asking yourself the following prompt before sending out the refinement meeting invite:

Who on the team knows the most about this item and could complete it the quickest?

Sometimes the answer to this question could just be one person, or sometimes a small group of people are needed to complete a certain task. Your goal is to narrow down the number of people needed to attend a given refinement meeting while ensuring that those who are invited can provide the full picture on every item you hope to cover.

It also helps to group your refinements by topic to ensure that your attendees can all speak about every item. For example, you don’t want to choose items for refinement that require completely different skill sets and have to invite several teammates to have access to their breadth of knowledge. You’ll find that your team is more engaged when everyone can contribute to every item. Thus, if you can group refinement items by topic, you’ll be rewarded with a more detailed outcome from every meeting.

If you do find yourself needing to refine unrelated items, try splitting the meetings up and inviting just the people that need to be there. No one will be annoyed that they only need to be present at a meeting for 15 minutes instead of 45, and the more time you save your team, the happier everyone will be!

How do you know when you’re done refining?

It can be tricky to know when a task is well-defined enough that everyone in a project management meeting understands the goals with no remaining questions. It may be the case that even after refinement, questions that you don’t have answers to will come up during team meetings - and that’s okay! It is simply important to minimize the number of interruptions caused, and a great way to do that is to ensure you have invited the right people to the refinement in the first place. So long as the team experts who you have invited are confident that every part of a given task is clearly laid out, you should be all set.

Another great way to check if an item has been refined enough is to ask someone who isn’t a domain expert to check on the item and see if they have any questions about the sub-tasks outlined or the methodology employed. If someone who isn’t intimately acquainted with the steps needed to complete a task can clearly see what needs to be done and the complexity of the task, you’ll know that you’ve done a good job!

An example to get you started

In the final section of this article, we’ll take a look at an example task and take you through the following steps:

1. The initial state of the task when it is created
2. What a refinement meeting would look like for this task
3. How this task is transformed after refinement and before it is assigned.

Up until this point we’ve looked at the kinds of tasks that need to be refined, how and when to schedule refinement meetings, who to invite, and how to determine when a task is ready for presentation to the team. But now let’s look at what processing an example task could actually look like. Keep in mind that these aren’t hard and fast rules that must be followed, but instead a set of guidelines that you can keep in the back of your mind while running great refinement meetings.

New Task: Add “Use Case” Pages to the Company Website

At a first glance, this task looks pretty self-explanatory. The goal here is to grow the discoverability of your company’s website and improve the experience of users trying to learn more about how your product or service might help them. But how exactly do we go about executing this task? How long will it take? Who should be responsible and what are the steps to completion?

You could try and figure out the answers to each of these questions at your next team meeting, but do you really need everyone present to iron out the related sub-tasks? From here, consider the unknowns listed above and any others you might think of, and determine who on your team would be able to help the most, with coverage of every question.

Now it’s time to schedule the meeting! Since we are only looking at a single task here, schedule a 15-minute meeting with the relevant teammates and send out the invites. Bonus points for sending out an agenda beforehand! Even though it is only a single item, having your team be aware of the discussion point and purpose of the meeting will help them arrive prepared. If you really want to keep things simple, sending out a shared document where everyone can jot down some notes before arriving can make your meeting even more efficient.

Once everyone is at the meeting, let’s take a look at a good way to run things.

Running the Refinement Meeting

There are many guides out there that outline a set of steps to follow during your refinement meetings, but we advocate for a laxer set of rules, so long as you achieve the goal of adding all of the context you need to a particular task, with something called the DEEP method.

Though you can take a look at the DEEP method requirements in detail if you are interested, the most important point is that your task is Detailed Appropriately. That is, once the team member assigned to the task begins working on it, they should have everything they need to get started: all of the necessary context, the sub-tasks required, who to coordinate with on certain aspects of the task, and the reason that the task is being completed.

Going back to our example of “Use Case” pages, those in attendance at the refinement meeting should help you itemize the flow of the entire task. By the end of the meeting, you should have something like the completed card in the image below, where the purpose of the task is clear, the sub-tasks are evident, and the time necessary to complete the task is agreed upon. All told, you should aim for something like the task pictured below.

A fully refined task!

After the refinement meeting, your task should be fully described and ready for presentation during the next team planning meeting. With our example of the “Use Case” pages, you’d expect the task to look something like in the image above, but we’ve also added the full details below for your convenience.

TASK: Add Use Case Pages to Company Website

PURPOSE: Use Case pages will help visitors to the company site see how our service can be tailored to their business and help them achieve their goals. For this reason, we will create pages for Small Businesses, Medium Businesses, and Enterprise Customers.

SUB-TASKS:

1. Complete copy for each of the three pages.
2. Design images based on copy and mockup site.
3. Develop frontend and deploy to staging server for review and testing.
4. Release to production after QA.

TIMELINE: 1 week. Since steps must be performed sequentially, 1 week is needed for coordination and implementation.

While these details are important, you are always free to add more information if you think it will help your teammates grasp all of the information needed. For this reason, we also recommend that you take good meeting notes during your refinements about every item discussed so that if there are any outstanding questions, you can send out the notes to provide additional context, instead of interrupting the planning meeting.

Bringing it all together

Overall, we’ve seen that the purpose of refinement meetings isn’t simply to flesh out task details, but to do so in a way that saves your entire team time during planning meetings. If your refinements are executed correctly, planning meetings should no longer get derailed over minor detail discussions and can actually be used just for planning.

Sticking to a very strict set of rules for your refinement meetings can hinder creative thinking, so we advocate for a loose set of guidelines and goals to keep in mind when running yours. In general, try to keep the refinement of one task down to 15 minutes and only invite the team members that must be there. Make sure to keep good notes throughout these meetings and add as much context as you think is necessary to each task to ensure everyone involved in completing the task is clear on the requirements.

Simply by making these small adjustments to how your team already figures out task requirements, you should be able to save your entire team time every week, helping to boost their productivity and clarity on their work!

Starting in a new role at a large company is exciting but stressful, and right after getting settled in you might find yourself looking for ways to stand out from your peers to help further develop your career. Though nothing stands out like great work, there are several smaller actions you can take to impress your higher-ups and progress your career. These more minor actions include things like responsiveness to emails or internal communication, arriving on time to meetings, presenting clearly at team demos, and more. There are tons of articles out there outlining these general principles, but in this post, we’ll look at an action that might not be so obvious: coming prepared to every meeting you attend with an agenda. Concretely, let’s look at how an agenda by your side would reflect well on your ability to lead projects and take responsibility for your work.

Who needs an agenda anyway?

If your job consists largely of ‘knowledge work’ then you’ll likely find yourself attending a lot of meetings. Meetings are a great way to align team members to a common goal and are a breeding ground for innovation and new ideas, but if run incorrectly, they can feel like a waste of time that subtracts from your ability to get important work done. There is a never-ending discussion about how many meetings, how often, and how long each one should be, but like it or not meetings are critical so getting the most out of each one is an important goal.

There are lots of best practices out there for running effective meetings, but at the core of every professional guide, you’ll find the need for a solid agenda. This list of items that the meeting needs to address can range from a few notes scribbled on a sheet of paper to a detailed checklist complete with a time limit for each point, all the documents everyone would need to participate in the discussion, and a description of the goal of the conversation for that point.

Though we have other resources on how to craft the right agenda for the right type of meeting, as mentioned above, let’s look at a strategy that only takes a minute or two of your time before every meeting but pays dividends down the line.

The Efficient Agenda

Every meeting, no matter how short or open-ended, has at least one item that needs to be discussed. For this meeting to go smoothly, everyone in attendance should have roughly the same idea of what the discussion is going to be about. If five different people come to the same meeting with five different ideas about the meeting’s purpose, you’ll get a lot of discussion but not on the topics that everyone is prepared to talk about. These unorganized meetings can end up wasting a lot of your team members’ time, especially if follow-up meetings are needed when the points brought up end up being more involved than previously thought.

So how do you make sure that everyone is on the same page before diving into a meeting? You set up an agenda that everyone agrees on. Let’s take a look at what goes into such an agenda.

Step 1: Identify the type of meeting

The kind of agenda you write should be based on the kind of meeting you will be attending. For example, if you are attending a daily standup, you don’t need to include details about each agenda item: just a simple list of points to discuss will do. However, if you are attending a large product meeting with a few different teams, adding some detail to each agenda item (such as any relevant documents or points of discussion) is a must-have. We have some additional sources on common types of meetings here.

Step 2: Jot down a draft agenda

Now that you have the meeting’s context in mind, grab a piece of paper or open up the word processor of your choice to write your agenda. In roughly 30 seconds to a minute, itemize what you think needs to occur during the meeting. Don’t worry if this list isn’t comprehensive or if you aren’t sure you caught everything, this is just your starting point.

Step 3: Share with your teammates

This last step is what gets everyone aligned and ensures that your meetings go smoothly and productively each time. Though it may seem daunting to share your work with your coworkers, it is important that everyone sees the agenda at least once before the actual meeting and it is a great way to show that you are taking initiative in keeping your team on track.

Pro Tip: a natural place to share the agenda with your team is either through the calendar invite everyone receives or through company communication. However you decide to share your agenda, try and stay consistent so that your coworkers always know where to go to find the agenda should they need it.

Sharing your draft agenda early on is a great way to get feedback while also easing the need for the items you jotted down to be specific and finalized. If you use software that updates in real-time for taking your agenda items, such as Google Docs, or Knowtworthy, you can let your team members know that they should feel free to add any items that they want to the list. Then, on the day of the meeting, simply check up on the list, add any items that may have become relevant since you first shared your agenda, and that’s it! You can now arrive at the meeting confident that your team is on track.

By consistently creating and curating agendas for your team, you can substantially boost your visibility between your peers and higher-ups and show that you are on top of your work and can take initiative to help improve your project. The Essential Agenda method only takes a minute or two per meeting and will reflect well on you. You can also reap the productivity rewards of maintaining consistent agendas. Now, if you need to look back on previous meetings and check when you discussed a certain element, you can do so with ease. Bonus points for keeping your agendas in an easily searchable place!

Next Steps

Creating an agenda for every meeting is a great place to start, but as I mentioned earlier, a lot goes into running consistently great meetings. On top of the agenda you may also want to include the following items:

• purpose: the reason that the meeting is being held
• description: where and when the meeting was held along with who was in attendance
• action items: the attributed task list based on the decisions that come out of every meeting
• minutes: the notes synthesizing the discussion you had during the meeting
• transcripts: what was said during the meeting (if you are recording for later)

Each of these items deserves a post in and of themselves, but if you want to improve the quality of your team’s documentation and the productivity of your meetings, I recommend you stay tuned or subscribe for further posts where we’ll cover all of these items and more!

Our newest release has a number of user experience improvements and additional features that we are excited to share with you! Our main focus with this release was on the settings/preferences experience alongside improvements to our transcription features.

A number of the features that we created came from your suggestions on our Trello roadmap, so thank you for voting for the features you care about!

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts on our community page here: https://community.knowtworthy.com/

Changelog

New

• Users can now download both real-time and file-upload transcripts of their meetings to easy-to-read text files either for storage or later review since real-time transcripts are ephemeral.
• The settings page is now reformatted to improve the experience of larger organizations. Tabs have been added to separate personal settings from those of an entire organization or team. Users can now more rapidly change settings without needing to enter an 'edit' mode every time.

Improvements

• Timers set for agenda items had a convoluted process of actually selecting a time. We migrated to a better library and improved the experience overall.
• The real-time transcription experience is improved. Long transcripts will be automatically split up into more digestible sections. The transcripts are now scrollable alongside the minutes document instead of requiring you to scroll a long way down the page.
• Breadcrumbs within the home page are now easier to use and more intuitive. This makes it easier to navigate to the teams and folders you need to get to.
• Users can now change team titles and descriptions from the team settings page.

Fixes

• Timers are now fully synchronized across all users regardless of local time and time zone.
• An issue where teams marked for deletion would still be shown within a user's "Action Item" time was resolved.
• Users will receive proper onboarding and helpful guide emails when signing up for Knowtworthy. An issue was causing an improper email type allocation.
• Fixed an issue where SSL Certificates were not being properly allocated for users using the CNAME feature.
• Members of teams were previously able to see the "Delete Team" button. They did not have permission to click this button but we removed it to make things more obvious for regular members without admin privileges.

In a perfect world, all of your meeting notes would be nice, formatted documents containing all of the information that comes out of your meetings, so that any time you look back, you can easily get any details that you need. But that's rarely how it plays out. In any given meeting, you are constantly juggling note-taking, personally contributing your thoughts and ideas, and understanding what others are bringing to the table, so meeting minutes are often on the back-burner. Similarly, going back and updating your meeting notes after the fact might seem like a good idea, but this cuts away at the time you can spend on the rest of your work and may not be the best way to spend your time before your next meeting.

So what's the solution? How can you balance taking valuable meeting notes and efficient time management while in a meeting? One solution you may have heard of is audio transcription. If you could write down everything that was said during a meeting and search through it later, you would have created the perfect meeting minutes, right? Unfortunately, personally writing out complete meeting transcripts is an even more absurd proposition than following up on every set of meeting minutes afterwards. How could you hope actively contribute to and learn from your meetings if you have your head down writing the whole time? So, if we leave human transcription for professional stenographers, perhaps there are technological solutions out there that will do the trick!

Meeting transcription technology has gotten better in leaps and bounds over the years and modern speech-to-text neural networks can return highly accurate real-time transcription from good audio. So if you can get your hands on a solid meeting transcription engine, you will have solved meeting notes, right? Not quite, there's a catch. While getting a solid transcription software for your meeting minutes is a great start, if you've ever looked at raw transcripts from a long conversation you'll know that what you have is an impenetrable wall of text that is essentially just as useful as having no notes at all! Furthermore, if your audio quality isn't great or more than one meeting participant is speaking, even the best automatic transcription tools will produce mistakes.

That isn't to say that meeting transcripts aren't useful, but a hybrid approach is critical if you want to maximize your efficiency. To create great minutes, you need to combine

1. A great meeting minutes template to keep your note-taking process simple
2. The thoroughness of real-time meeting transcriptions
3. Your ability to pick out the important information in any meeting

With these key ingredients, you can easily produce excellent meeting notes every time, with minimal effort! In the remainder of this article, we will look at each of these points and discuss how you can get into the habit of writing excellent minutes every time you step into the meeting room.

Step 1: Find a Meeting Minutes Template you Love

The key to being efficient during a meeting is a great meeting minutes template. There are articles out there discussing what you should include in your meeting minutes template, but find one that works for you and one that you can quickly populate. Broadly, your template should have room to outline three main things: your meeting agenda items, meeting minutes, and meeting action items.

Meeting Agenda

The agenda is simply a list of points you wish to cover during the meeting that acts as a guide for the topics that you will cover in more depth in the meeting minutes. There are a number of things to consider when writing your meeting agenda, but make sure to keep in mind the meeting's main goals, how long you have to spend discussing everything, and the required decisions.

Meeting Minutes

The minutes act as your meeting notes and the written record of what happened during the meeting. This is a great place to summarize the key points of the meeting and acts as a place to add context to the action items produced. When writing your meeting minutes, you may want to consider the kind of meeting you are in and the meeting's purpose to determine how formal or conversational you want to be.

Meeting Action Items

This list contains the next steps decided on during the meeting. These are often tasks assigned to specific people on the attendee list. The action items are often considered the single most important thing to come out of any meeting, so above all else, make sure you record your next steps clearly!

You can store your meeting minutes wherever you please: online, on your computer or in a notebook, what matters is that whenever you have a meeting you can quickly get your meeting minutes template ready for use. We personally recommend that you store your minutes online so that you can keep an official record of the meeting and keep online sharing simple for your entire team.

You may want to consider adding additional information to your template covering important meeting details like logging the meeting participants, what the meeting's purpose is, and how much time you intend to spend on each agenda item. Once you are comfortable with your meeting minutes template, you can quickly add information to your document and save time looking for details when you look back on your notes in the future.

For a more detailed look at setting up your perfect template, check out our free "Ultimate Guide to Boosting Team Productivity with Templates" or our dozens of free templates from our Template Bank

Step 2: Run Real-Time Transcription During your Meetings

If the other meeting attendees are comfortable with it (maybe they want in on the excellent minutes as well!) find a real-time meeting transcription software that you can keep on during your meeting. The most important aspect of this step is not that you will have transcripts available to review later, but rather that you can look at a backlog of what was said a minute or two ago in the meeting while you are writing meeting minutes.

Conversation flows fast in productive meetings, and the most unproductive action you can take is to purposely skip mentioning your thoughts or viewpoints in favour of taking minutes. Real-time meeting transcription can provide a fallback that allows you to confidently participate whenever you want to while never missing a beat in your meeting minutes by simply looking back at what was said when there is a lull in the meeting or someone else is making a point. And this leads us right to the final point:

Step 3: Discern what Matters on your Own

A monolith of words won't be helpful a month down the line when you revisit your transcripts, and errors of interpretation often present in meeting minute transcription engines can obscure important points. At the end of the day, you are the best person suited to crafting your own meeting minutes and using transcripts as a tool to keep you engaged and prevent you from missing any crucial details is the best way to make use of this technology. If you use a transcription tool that runs alongside your meeting minutes, you may find it useful to copy and paste some parts of the transcripts directly into the minutes, meeting agenda, or action items. Just make sure that you aren't copying over the entire set of transcripts, focus on what matters.

In the example below, notice that we select just the key point from the transcript to copy over instead of the whole paragraph. When choosing how best to make use of your meeting transcripts, try and think critically about what you would find the most useful a month or a year from now when looking back on all of your previous meeting minutes and only record notes on those items.

Use Meeting Transcription to your Advantage

With these tools in mind, take a moment to reflect on your current meeting process and ask yourself if real-time transcription next to your minutes would be useful and if it would make you a more efficient minute-taker. If yes, start by setting up your template for your next meeting and enjoy the added boost of efficiency and confidence that these tools add to your professional arsenal!

In this update, we addressed a number of user experience optimizations and overall made the app easier to use, and reduced the learning curve to getting started. We also added some additional guide posts to our knowledgebase, and have linked them in the app to help you make the most of the app. Enjoy!

Changelog

New

• Users can now go from a team’s dashboard to “Manage Members” in settings, making it much quicker to add new people to a team.
• When adding a person to a team, the person will also automatically be added to the organization with “Viewer” permissions, meaning that you won’t need to go back and add them to the organization first.
• Users can now manage meeting participants directly from the “Share” popup within a meeting. This makes sharing the meeting with new people even quicker.
• Logged in users can now see a ‘Home’ button on their minutes document, allowing them to navigate back to their dashboard from a minutes document, so that you don’t need to switch tabs or in case you closed the home tab.
• Users can now manually remove real-time transcripts from their view in a minutes document and completely restart the transcription component. Though real-time transcripts are never saved, this gives some extra power to the user when choosing how to use transcription.
• A description and guide post was added to the “Home” page and “Team” dashboards: https://knowtworthy.com/guide/master-the-home-page/
• A description and guide post was added to the “My Meetings” page: https://knowtworthy.com/guide/how-to-use-the-my-meetings-page/

Improvements

• When downloading a PDF, the download button would not always open a new tab before downloading. Users should no longer lose the current page they are looking at when downloading a minutes document.
• Modifying or creating new agenda and action items now maintains a consistent height, making the experience a little more seamless.
• When creating a new team from the Home page, you will now see the team on the dashboard right away instead of needing to refresh.
• In some cases, users do not have permission to create new teams, we improved the error handling to make things more clear.
• Logged in users will now see a short explanation for why they cannot access transcription on a minutes document created in “My Meetings” to help reduce confusion about why transcription is available sometimes but now always.
• Numerous improvements were made to the navigation menu:

1. The “Inbox” was renamed to “Action Items” to make it more clear what purpose that page served.
2. A user’s context is now highlighted on the navigation menu, no matter where they are in the app. For example, if a user goes to “Settings”, the corresponding tab on the navigation menu will light up.
3. A user can now see their username and current location at the bottom of the navigation menu when it is open. As a result, it is easier to see what context a user is operating in.

• Breadcrumbs showing where the user is on their dashboard have been moved to the bottom to make way for improved descriptions of the user’s current location on the top of the page.
• Text sizes and spacing was made more consistent and accurate on the home page and dashboards.

Fixes

• Patched an issue where some settings pages would display oddly on very large displays.
• Fixed an issue where users could not add additional accounts to an organization
• Fixed an edge case where if a user creates an account and drops off before choosing a plan, the app would appear blank if they tried to log in again. The user is now redirected to select another plan and complete their onboarding process.

In our next update, we’ll be adding support for additional profile customization as well as calendar integrations!

In this update, we added a few quality-of-life improvements and squashed a number of bugs. Overall, you can now quickly create free-floating meetings from the Knowtworthy homepage and easily download them as a PDF when you're done!

Changelog

New

• Export Meeting Documents to PDF. We have re-vamped our PDF export feature under Meeting Details. The PDFs are redesigned to be cleaner and easier to read.
• Instant Meetings. Not sure if you want to create a Knowtworthy Account? Try our services for a one-off meeting. Starting an Instant Meeting will give you access to our meeting editor instantly.
• Operations Log. The Operations Log stores all of the changes made in your organization. This feature is designed to help managers audit their organizations and check for irregular behaviour.

Improvements

• Restructured the Login page to be easier to use for users with larger screens.
• Meeting Agenda Items and Action Items won't shift around when being edited.

Fixes

• Fixed spacing of the minutes editor. Meeting minutes content should better line up with cursors.
• Fixed a few bugs where live meeting members weren't updating properly.

Stay tuned for our next set of updates where we will be adding additional profile configuration options and improving upon the meeting minutes experience further!

We’ve all been there, you arrive at your 30-minute project progress meeting and before you know it - two hours have passed and you are still trying to figure out which vendor you should go with for your company’s next merchandise order. But what went wrong? Everyone who came to the meeting knew that the point of the meeting was to update the other present stakeholders about how the project has been progressing. But somehow after Ben mentioned that it wasn’t clear who the most cost-effective vendor would be and Susan commented that she had worked with a different vendor in the past, the conversation spiralled into a complete analysis of all possible options with no end in sight. Nobody had intervened to recommend that this conversation should have been taken offline, so everyone kept contributing. While this may have eventually led to some progress for your team, it encroached on everyone’s time and probably would have been more efficient had people come prepared knowing at least that merchandise vendors were to be the topic of discussion. Strategies for how to prevent your meeting from getting derailed is a topic for a different post, but here we will cover how 5 minutes of additional planning and how adding some simple structure to your meetings can save you and your teams hours every week.

But before you can make your next meeting more efficient, you need to have a good idea about what type of meeting you are dealing with and what the expected outcome will be. Generally, you’ll need three key pieces of information to get you started:

1. Who will be there?
2. How long is the meeting supposed to last?
3. What should be accomplished during this meeting?

Once you have an answer to these three questions you can begin to formulate an agenda that will help define the structure of your meeting. If the meeting is a progress meeting, then your agenda should identify who needs to provide the updates and who is meant to provide feedback. If your meeting is to discuss the solution to a particular set of problems, you should aim to clearly state the problems and, if not everyone is apprised, make sure you have someone ready to present the problem and the current progress towards the solution before the discussion can start.

A good tip to keep in mind is that the level of detail in your agenda should be consistent with the formality of the meeting. Is this a quick 15-minute standup meeting? Then jot down the main goal and who will be providing the updates. Is this a 3 hour quarterly board meeting? Then ensure your agenda contains everything you expect to cover alongside all of the relevant reference material that will be used during the meeting. It is up to you to decide how much information your agenda should provide, but remember that your goal is to save as much of your team’s time as you can with this planning step.

Once you have an agenda you like, a good exercise to get into the habit of doing is estimating how long each agenda item will take to complete and ensuring that your plan still seems reasonable. If everything is allotted a reasonable amount of time and you are happy with the plan, you are all set! However, if you find that you are struggling to fit every agenda item into the assumed length of the meeting, you can try one of the following solutions:

If your team has a flexible schedule

Sometimes, it just makes sense to increase the amount of time the meeting will take. You should think carefully before doing this, however, as it will directly influence your team’s overall productivity. But, if you have an end-of-week team demo and everyone needs to present and you keep running over time despite trying other solutions, you may want to consider expanding the length of the meeting. You won’t be able to get a detailed presentation from 8 people during a 30-minute meeting - that’s normal. And don’t forget that things can go the other way as well! If you notice that you are consistently spending less time than expected, be sure to update the meeting invite to reflect this so that people can use this extra time productively.

If you can’t meet any other time

If you only have an hour of shared time with your team members and find yourselves pressed for time every time you meet, you need to get creative with ways to optimize your meeting. Here are a couple of suggestions that you might find helpful:

1. Try and find items on your agenda that don't require everyone’s attendance to cover and see if you can schedule for a different time with a smaller subset of the team.
2. If some of the agenda items require a lot of explanation, see if you can send out relevant material beforehand. Not only is it helpful for your team to have content like this documented anyway, but it will also help save time during the meeting by having people come prepared to the meeting having read everything ahead of time.
3. Check if any agenda items can be cycled every other meeting. If you are finding that some agenda items often have updates or some points to discuss, but rarely anything substantial, try and reschedule them to the next meeting if they are not time-sensitive. This allows you to have more in-depth conversations when there are larger updates and you will save a lot of time in your meetings as switching topics can take longer than you think!

Now that your agenda is complete, it may look something like this:

Purpose of the meeting: To select a vendor for the company’s next merchandise order.

Agenda:

• Ben’s presentation on vendor options (15 Minutes)
• Discussion time for pros and cons with each (10 Minutes)
• Select the top option and plan the next steps (5 Minutes)

Total Time: 30 minutes

Now share your agenda with your team as early as you can before the meeting and take note of how the added structure saves you time every week!

Minutes are a critical tool for organizations to keep track of decisions, important events, and keep open lines of communication with the intention of making everyone more productive. However, bad minutes taken during a critical meeting can derail teams and cost businesses valuable time trying to re-coordinate and recover the lost information. The tricky thing about minutes is that it can be difficult to define a set of concrete steps that will always lead to "perfect" minutes, but we will cover how the preparing for the right kind of meeting will help you write better minutes and hopefully save you a lot of time and headache in the long run.

Not all meetings are the same and there is no point in taking formal meeting minutes and action items like you would at a board meeting at an ad hoc team meeting or a one-on-one with a colleague. Put simply, the formality and detail of the minutes should correspond directly with the formality of the meeting and the importance of the information discussed. That being said, all good minutes have the following in common: all key decisions and major ideas discussed in the meeting have been captured. If you are writing minutes for a quick team meeting to discuss a workaround to a roadblock you’ve been facing, you might draft up some bullet points about the important points discussed and the course of action agreed upon. Since everyone who is impacted by the decision was at that meeting, you likely don’t need to write down too much context and reasoning for why the decision was made, rather your minutes should help cue in attendees about the next actions should they look back on the minutes at a later time. In a board meeting, however, you should add all the relevant context you can to the key decisions and major ideas as the topics discussed here will affect far more than just the attendees of the meeting. Someone who needs to understand the changes proposed at the board meeting but who wasn’t in attendance should be able to look at the minutes and understand the thought process that led to the key decisions.

Check out the following example: suppose your organization runs into the following hypothetical problem: A third-party tool (Tool X) that is used organization-wide is set to cease operations, causing you to find a replacement solution. Both the board meeting and team meeting discuss the same ideas: either taking the time and resources to build a similar internal tool (Tool Y) to avoid having this issue ever arise again, or reaching out to the tool’s competitors and requesting some proposals for how they could handle your use case. Both meetings end up deciding on the same thing: to build the tool internally, but the documentation around each decision would vary quite a bit.
The team’s meeting notes might look something like this:

Purpose of meeting: To discuss next actions in replacing Tool X with a new solution.

Building the tool internally would help avoid this issue in the future, Ben has some experience building similar technology.

Action Items:

1. Sync up with Ben to lay out the total cost and timeline of replacing the tool internally.
2. Relay results to management and allocate team resources to building Tool Y.
3. Contact UX team and put together a concrete list of use cases that are needed from Tool Y.

Whereas the board meeting’s notes on this particular issue might look something like this:

Purpose of meeting: To discuss next actions in replacing Tool X with a new solution.

Two main options were considered:

1. Sending out calls for proposals from Tool X’s competitors. This would save time and money in the short term and might ease the transition by moving to a similar tool with the same core feature-set. The issue is that a similar problem like the current one might arise in the future and another switch would be needed. The sales cycle for such a large enterprise use case might also take a while and new employee training would be required.
2. Replicating Tool X’s core feature set for internal use. This approach would almost certainly take longer than transitioning to a competitor and cost more up-front, but would prevent the possibility of needing to switch again later. There is also risk associated with starting to use a tool that has not been tested by the market before. On the other hand, one of the development teams has just freed up from a separate project and would be able to take this on. Some developers in the organization also have experience with technology similar to what’s required from a new Tool Y. A development timeline is needed to make sure the organization doesn't have to spend a large amount of time with no tool.

After consideration, option 2 (building a custom internal tool) was selected as the benefits of having full control over the tool’s feature set and the fact that the organization is in a good position to create an equivalent with a free team of developers outweighs the benefits of option 1 (switching to a competitor of Tool X).

Action items:

1. Put together a detailed budget and timeline for building out Tool Y and assign to the free team. Circle back on progress in the next meeting.

As you can see, the decisions and logical paths of both meetings are similar, but both the content of the minutes themselves and the resulting action items are different. The board's minutes have significantly more content around the decision and the resulting action items are quite general as the specifics will be decided by another team and that would be outside of the board's scope. On the other hand, the team meeting's minutes just needed to mark the key decisions but much more specific action items and next steps were written as they are the ones who would be following through on those tasks.

Board meetings and team meetings are not the only kinds of meetings where a specific minute-taking structure is important. There are a number of different meeting 'classes' and tailoring your minutes to the particular kind of meeting will help you both document the important information correctly and will save you time. As you see in both the team meeting and board meeting, the minutes are not transcripts of what happened during the meeting, they are synthesized points outlining the major ideas and actions. They are both useful to others looking at the minutes after the fact and don't require too much work after the meeting is over to edit and adjust. With this information in mind, try to sort out the types of meetings you are actively taking minutes for beforehand and think about how you can save yourself time and energy by just focusing on the most important aspects instead of logging every detail.