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Tag: Meetings

Six Ways to Improve Your Management Meetings

Earlier this year, I started observing the management meetings of some of my fastest-growing CEOs. The companies they lead range from 50 to 500 employees — but each of the CEOs had similar concerns about their meetings: ‘They feel superficial’ ‘My manager...

The 10 Most Common Types of Work Meetings (and How to Run Them Well)

Which meetings do you have coming up? How will you ensure that your next meeting is a success? Most of us have a love-hate relationship with meetings. We get frustrated with how much time they take up but also appreciate that meetings, at some level, are important. So, if we are going to commit t...

Too Many Meetings Is Not Your Problem

Recently Shopify decided to kill all its meetings, and somehow it was newsworthy. I’ve personally been a part of multiple efforts to combat meetings. A few years back Airbnb declared a “calendar amnesty.” With new guidance, everyone’s calendars were summarily wiped clean...

How to Master Your Time: The Ultimate Guide to Efficient Meetings

You’re in a meeting with too many attendees. Half of the group constantly glancing at the clock or their watch, the other half doing some unproductive e-mail reading and only two persons having a conversation. From time to time, someone looks up from his or her laptop to give a comment, but...

Supercharge Your Meetings: Secrets to Engaging and Productive Team Meetings

Have you ever experienced a meeting that seems to drag on endlessly with no clear outcome or decision? Have you found yourself wishing there was an easier way to collaborate and develop productive solutions as a team? Well, the truth is that energized and productive meetings can happen with strat...

What people-related questions should be asked in board meetings in 2020?

The pandemic has forced a lot of businesses to enter a survival mode. The immediate reaction of the majority of boards is to focus on key business metrics such as revenue. However, in order to unlock that revenue, businesses must learn the correlation between business growth and key people-related m...

Supercharge Your Meetings and Get More Done in Less Time

The modern corporate environment is one that moves quickly, and time is a valuable resource. Every second matters, and success depends on maximizing production. The commonplace business meeting is one setting where time often seems to pass unnoticed. While these gatherings frequently aim to promote ...

More icebreakers you can steal for better meetings

What helps start a hard meeting on a positive note? How do you encourage team members to think bigger? The answer: icebreakers. Or should I say, the answer is still icebreakers? Last year I wrote an article about the power of this misunderstood tool to impact group attitude...

The 4 questions you should stop asking during your one-on-one meetings

Looking at the clock. Staring into the distance. Short, nondescript answers. A CEO recently told me how he’d frequently see this body language from an employee during their one-on-one meetings. Flat. Disinterested. Preoccupied. It felt lousy to witness, but it’d always been this ...

Too Many Meetings Is Not Your Problem

Recently Shopify decided to kill all its meetings, and somehow it was newsworthy. I’ve personally been a part of multiple efforts to combat meetings. A few years back Airbnb declared a “calendar amnesty.” With new guidance, everyone’s calendars were summarily wiped clean...

Six Ways to Improve Your Management Meetings

Earlier this year, I started observing the management meetings of some of my fastest-growing CEOs. The companies they lead range from 50 to 500 employees — but each of the CEOs had similar concerns about their meetings: ‘They feel superficial’ ‘My manager...

Six Ways to Improve Your Management Meetings

Earlier this year, I started observing the management meetings of some of my fastest-growing CEOs. The companies they lead range from 50 to 500 employees — but each of the CEOs had similar concerns about their meetings: ‘They feel superficial’ ‘My manager...

Too Many Meetings Is Not Your Problem

Recently Shopify decided to kill all its meetings, and somehow it was newsworthy. I’ve personally been a part of multiple efforts to combat meetings. A few years back Airbnb declared a “calendar amnesty.” With new guidance, everyone’s calendars were summarily wiped clean...

How to Plan and Run Effective Meetings (In 7 Questions)

What is the one thing that wastes most of your time at work? You might have said ‘emails’, you might even have said ‘that annoying colleague who always hangs around my desk’, but most likely you will have said ‘meetings’. That is because most employees face ...

Leading with Impact: Proven Strategies for Empowering Team Decisions and Facilitating Productive Meetings

Have you ever seen a team hung up on making a decision? You may feel like you, as a leader, have empowered them to collaborate. You have ensured that all of the right people are in the room. You have clearly articulated your vision. But it seems some unseen force is pushing team members in different...

How to Be Bold and Speak Up in Meetings

Are you bold enough to say what you need to say in a meeting, or do you feel knots in your stomach and refuse to speak up? You may find it hard to share your voice in a meeting because of these limiting beliefs: What if they think my idea is stupid? I don’t have anything valuable to s...

How to lead engaging group discussions in workshops and meetings

Group discussions can go either way: they can be very fruitful and spark new ideas. They can also end in a complete mess or leave us with a feeling of having wasted our time. How can we make sure that we are having more fruitful conversations? I want to share some tips and strategies for leading ...

Which Meetings Should You Kill?

Meetings, ugh. Even those of us who like a good meeting have plenty of experience sitting through painful, boring, poorly-run meetings that seem to exist only to waste our time. Engineers hate meetings: they take you out of flow and (in the pre-remote days) away from your monitors so that you can li...

The Peculiar And Heinous Tedium Of Most Meetings

Almost everyone I’ve ever worked with hates meetings, or at the very least pretends to hate meetings but really likes going to them because they fill up the day and prevent real work (a-ha!), and yet despite decades now of “A meeting that could have been an email” memes, ...

Bloated Meetings Waste Time. We Need Better Norms

Let’s face it: most of us have sat in meetings that could have been an email. We zone out, scroll through our phones, and think about the to-do list piling up. It’s not just annoying — it’s a waste of precious time. But guess what? It doesn’t have to be this way. Here&r...

How to run savvy & productive meetings

No matter how large or small your team, these methods can render every meeting a success Are you tentative or scared when a meeting with a client or teammate looms on the horizon? Or, do you find yourself unprepared to organize a logical meeting set-up to confidently take the lead? If so, you ...

Breaking Free Of The Boardroom — 5 natural alternatives to office meetings

Let’s face it, even the most modern and creative boardrooms, well…suck. For more than 99% of human’s time on Earth we have lived off the land and deeply connected to the spaces around us. Fast forward to today and we live in boxes. We have become ‘’containerized’...

How To Create an Unforgettable Impact During Meetings

Meetings were always extremely stressful for me, especially when dealing with a difficult decision and needing other people’s buy-in. I worried about being unprepared, uncharming, and not knowing what to say when someone asked me a question. So I over-prepared, tried to appear likable, and ...

How To Look And Sound Great For Under $700 — Podcasting, Zoom Meetings And Beyond

Here is my final plea… It has never been easier (and cheaper) to look and sound better on any kind of Zoom call, podcast, Teams or Skype call. I’m frustrated with how many guests on my podcasts (both Six Pixels of Separation — The ThinkersOne...

A frustration about meetings

First, on me, I am an ex-consultant, ex-corporate with about 9 years of work experience. Since I left my corporate job last year, I have been wandering around the start-up world. I launched Surprise.date, Dogswelcome and some smaller ‘idea balloons’. I also participated in...

Why Most Meetings Are Useless

During my career as a software engineer, I’ve participated in countless meetings and felt that a large majority of them were nothing more than a waste of time. Be it meetings with managers, product or technical discussions, I’d estimate that around 80% of them felt useless. If you’...

Three key drivers to improve meetings

Earlier I shared my view on how our current digital economy has made it easy to ask for experiences to be rated (Uber, Airbnb, Netflix). But this trend seems to be lacking in the workspace. Hierarchial and peer relations prevent us from sharing feedback, and most of us admit to having...

How to Have the Best Bad Meetings

People keep complimenting me on my meetings, and I don’t like it. It’s not even just my meetings! I get compliments for meetings that people on my team run. “Wow, people actually get stuff done in your meetings.” “I love that people don’t interrupt me.&r...

Recent research shows this drives effective meetings

So you’re trying to run an effective meeting? Likely you are fed up with the little value you feel you get out of them. Rest assured: you are not alone. In a recent survey we conducted for Rate My Meeting, only 27% said to feel productive in their meetings. Most (45%) feel like time is wa...

Revolutionize Corporate Meetings: Modern Strategies to Combat Meeting Madness and Boost Productivity

Meetings — love them or loathe them, they are an essential part of corporate life. In theory, they serve as a platform for collaboration, idea exchange, and decision-making. However, in practice, they often devolve into what can only be described as “Meeting Madness.” The excess...

Transcribe Your Meetings with Fireflies.ai

Are you spending more time jotting down meeting notes than actively participating in the discussion? Do you often forget key decisions made during the conversation? With Fireflies.ai, you can automate your meeting notes and make the most out of your voice conversations. Fireflies.ai is an AI...

Mastering Asynchronous Meetings: 8 Best Practices

Meetings consume a significant amount of our time — precisely 31 hours per month. This is not just wasteful but also inefficient and stressful. This issue has become even more pronounced in the post-pandemic era, where we find ourselves in six times as many group meetings and...

How to Master Your Time: The Ultimate Guide to Efficient Meetings

You’re in a meeting with too many attendees. Half of the group constantly glancing at the clock or their watch, the other half doing some unproductive e-mail reading and only two persons having a conversation. From time to time, someone looks up from his or her laptop to give a comment, but...

Efficient and Effective Meetings

Meetings are necessary for many workplaces, but they can also be a major time-waster. If not run efficiently and effectively, meetings can drain employee morale and productivity. There are a number of things that meeting facilitators can do to ensure that their meetings are both efficient and...

Face-to-Face ANDA Program Meetings

Expansion of In-Person, Face-to-Face ANDA Program Meetings Beginning October 2, 2023, the FDA Generic Drug Program will expand in-person face-to-face (FTF) meetings with industry. A major theme of the GDUFA III Commitment Letter is to maximize the efficiency and utility of each assessment cycl...

How to Best Make Use of Your Time When You Constantly Have Meetings?

Being an engineer requires deep focus during your work. Writing code requires loads of context. On top of it, you might also need to dig deep into the call stack and understand how different services interact with one another. If you lose your train of thought while doing it, your best bet is pro...

10 Meeting Agenda Templates for Highly Productive Meetings

Using a meeting agenda template for every meeting will help you save time and create consistency across all of your conversations. Meeting templates will also ensure the most important and relevant things are discussed at every meeting. Saving and reusing the same template will build th...

Why Do Software Engineers Want To Skip Scrum Meetings?

Have you ever logged into a weekly standup where your Scrum Master didn’t arrive for 5 minutes? Every time I do, it’s usually just the same 2 questions going around in circles — “Hi X, how are you?” — “Good, how are you?” As the meeting progresse...

10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings

Like everyone, appearing smart in meetings is my top priority. Sometimes this can be difficult if you start daydreaming about your next vacation, your next nap, or bacon. When this happens, it’s good to have some fallback tricks to fall back on. Here are my ten favorite tricks for quickly appe...

This Business Has ZERO Meetings. Here’s Why.

Most people I speak to, hate meetings. Most agree a lot of them are meaningless and add little value. What if there was another way? Would you try it? Imagine if there was a way where you could work with a team completely asynchronously, maximizing your time spent without interruptions. I f...

How I Move My Meetings to Async.

Have you ever felt like scheduling a meeting with your team is a bit like playing Tetris? You need to find that elusive half-hour slot where everyone’s availability aligns, turning it into a puzzling endeavour. I enjoy spontaneous discussions to solve problems and participa...

6 ways to help people feel more comfortable in meetings

Whether you’re leading a 60-minute meeting or a multi-day workshop, keeping people engaged and incentivized to contribute often boils down to one fundamental thing: comfort. Comfort is physical, mental and emotional. It’s applicable to introverts and extroverts. And it’s somethi...

Do you always yawn snore in your business meetings? Here why?

Do you ever find yourself yawning and craving a nap when you’re stuck in a never-ending meeting or a particularly dull lecture? Or perhaps you’ve experienced the overwhelming urge to snooze while binge-watching a not-so-exciting TV show? Well, you’re not alone! It’s a curious...

Unlocking Efficiency: The Art of Leading Meetings and Committees

In the dynamic world of decision-making, committees often play a pivotal role, but they are a double-edged sword. When an important decision is to be made, each additional person in the group adds a unique perspective and a potential solution. Additionally, the absence of someone with a vital per...

Dare to Ask ‘When’: The Overlooked MVP Question in Meetings

The more meetings you attend, the more you’ll see the same scenarios again and again. People debate the ins and outs of the particular challenge in front of them. Volunteers, or conscripts, are identified to own each of the actions that represent the next steps forward. Mortal enemies set thei...

Avoiding Death by Meetings

Do you dread opening up Google Calendar? Not because you don’t know what you’ll see, but because you do? Meetings. One after the other. All freakin’ day long. Whether you take meetings in person or via Zoom, a stacked day of meetings can be a total slog. Let’s...

The Last Word: Navigating The ‘’One-Up’’ Culture in Meetings

While some meetings feel like productive brainstorming sessions, others feel like an Olympic event where the main sport is “one-upping.” You know what I’m talking about: that irresistible urge some people have to always get the last word in or to prove they are the smartest person ...

Read online Meetings with Remarkable Men: 2nd Series: Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff

Review Meetings with Remarkable Men nd Series Meetings with Remarkable Men by G I Gurdjieff [PDF] GET Meetings with Remarkable Men: 2nd Series: Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff Its well: Access Meetings with Remarkable Men: 2nd Series: Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdj...

The Power of Presence: Honoring the Invaluable Contributions of Quiet Individuals in Meetings

In the hustle and bustle of corporate meetings, it’s easy to overlook those who don’t speak up as often. Yet, their presence, their silent contributions, often hold immense power and depth. 1. The Quiet Phenomenon Not everyone thrives in vocalizing their thoughts or standing at the...

Jeff Bezos’ Rules for Meetings + A.I.

What if one man’s meeting culture could revolutionize your business? Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, came up with some pretty unique rules for meetings. And the exciting part? ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship language model, is poised to supercharge these principles and radically transform how ...

Transforming Meetings and Docs with AI Speech-to-Text

As a technical guy, I hate meetings. Even more, I hate taking meeting notes. It divides my attention during the meeting and exhausts me greatly. At some point, I decided there may be a way to improve this process, make it easier, or even make it better. That’s how I started experimenting...

Stop scheduling meetings without the 3Hs and 5Ps

Poorly planned and facilitated meetings are one of the biggest annoyances I’ve had to deal with in my career (second only to indecisiveness). A lot has changed in terms of technology but the amount of “bad” meetings I’ve had to go through has stayed relatively the same. ...

How to change Zoom Meetings to Teams Meetings in Outlook

To change a scheduled Zoom meeting to a Microsoft Teams meeting in Outlook on different platforms, follow these steps: Windows Open Outlook on your Windows machine. Navigate to the calendar and click on the Zoom meeting you want to change. Click Edit Delete the Zoom meeting link and d...

How to Organize meetings?

Meetings should have a single decision-maker There must be a clear decision-maker at every point in the process, someone whose butt is on the line. The decision-maker should be hands-on The decision-maker should: Call the meeting Ensure that the content is good Set the objectives ...

Fake webcam for your online meetings, with Python

Picture this. You’re in an online meeting, and for one reason or another you don’t really feel like putting your webcam on. But you see that everybody else has it on. So you feel obligated, you quickly arrange your hair and make sure your clothes look appropriate, and you switch the came...

6 Meeting Agenda Templates for Efficient Finance Meetings

Creating meeting agenda can help level-up your meeting productivity. But you don’t need to start from scratch! A meeting agenda template can provide built-in structure, inspire your team to add content in advance, and reduce the need to type out the same headings over and over aga...

Drowning in Meetings? Here’s Your Lifeline.

New research from Microsoft shows that people are in 3 times more meetings in 2023 than before the pandemic. How has it all gone so horribly wrong? Pre-pandemic where in-office ruled the roost Let’s rewind the clock a bit - before the COVID pandemic broke out in Feburary 20...

An introvert’s guide to speaking up in meetings

Facilitating meetings has been a major component of my career. As a consultant, I have hosted multi-day product strategy workshops at various client sites. As a UX Strategist, I have facilitated design-thinking workshops, meetings, and requirements gathering sessions. And in my current role as Senio...

When Daily Meetings Go Awry

I messed up the other day. During our daily 8:30 a.m. quality huddle I got passionate, to put it charitably. “What the hell is going on in that department?!?!” I yelled after learning about yet another quality problem for a part that we had been making for a long time wit...

Design: 7 Essential Meetings

While Agile Scrum has plenty to say about development rituals and ceremonies, I have not found too much written about design rituals. As Jared Spool says, “Design is a rendering of intent”. If this is true, then design can be used to facilitate communication. Therefore, it is use...

10 Activities For Family Meetings

Do you want to be included in the program An Evening in the Family,” in which all members are involved and feel good? We recommend 10 activities from which you can choose so that your whole family is delighted and can look forward to the special evening. Relaxation, fun, and movement—you...

Supercharge Your Meetings and Get More Done in Less Time

The modern corporate environment is one that moves quickly, and time is a valuable resource. Every second matters, and success depends on maximizing production. The commonplace business meeting is one setting where time often seems to pass unnoticed. While these gatherings frequently aim to promote ...

5 Meeting Agenda Templates for Creative Out of the Box Meetings

Meetings are an extremely important part of company culture and running fun, engaging meetings is a crucial and valuable skill. A meeting agenda template can provide built-in structure, inspire your team to add content in advance, and reduce the need to type out the same headings over a...

Meetings are a bit like a thermometer.

It seems like meetings have taken over the driver’s seat when it comes to shaping my work and intentions. I’ve been pondering whether I really have a decent level of control over my own job when my entire week seems to be swallowed up by meetings. It’s like meetings have become ...

Shopify Keeps Up the Fight Against Meetings

Last January, Shopify deleted all recurring meetings with more than 3 people. According to the story on CNN Business, “Slashing meetings could help make the company more efficient while also potentially boosting morale for some workers.” An exciting initiative with a bold tacti...

9 ways to improve your meetings

Over the last few years, I’ve taken part in almost 2,000 meetings. Not all of them are at the same level. Here is what I have observed and the 9 best practices you need to make your meetings effective. Research has found the average professional spends a third of his time in meetings. Th...

The 4 Scrum Ceremonies Made Simple: A Quick Guide To Scrum Meetings

Scrum ceremonies are important elements of the agile software delivery process. They are not just meetings for the sake of having meetings. Rather, these ceremonies provide the framework for teams to get work done in a structured manner, help to set expectations, empower the team to collaborate effe...

How Chief of Staff Operates Senior Leadership Meetings

Every high-performance organization adopts a strict and coordinated management system and customs for operational excellence. In order to achieve effective executive meetings, you’re going to need a handful of things to prepare, orchestrate, and follow up on. These meetings are important as...

The Types of Design Meetings

Certain phrases, when uttered into the void of a Calendar invitation, have very specific meanings to designers. For example, if you wake a lead designer up before 8am for a Design Review, our expectation is that we’ll be leading a call where the work to date is packaged up and pre...

Fix Bad Meetings with the 50% Rule

I won’t bury the lead here. If you really want to improve your meetings, make sure at least 50% of your meeting time is spent with customers. Not colleagues, not bosses, not vendors. Customers. Depending on your role and your business, your customer may vary. If you make products, you...

Everything you always wanted to know about running Silent Meetings but were too afraid to ask

What are Silent Meetings? “Silent Meetings” are meetings where most of the time is spent working and not talking. When done correctly most of the meeting is spent silently working together. Is it 100% silent? Not really… A rule of thumb is a silent meeting is where more than...

Preparing for Meetings While Dreaming? How Lucid Dreaming Could Transform Work in Unexpected Ways

As remote and hybrid work continue to reshape what it means to be productive, some startups are exploring unconventional ways to maximize our downtime. Prophetic, a brain-computer interface company, has developed a headset that claims to allow users to practice presentations, visualize meetings, and...

Unusual Meetings With The Machine Elves When High On DMT

DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, is a powerful psychedelic substance found in various plants and animals, including certain species of mushrooms, ayahuasca vine, and toads. It can also be synthesized in a laboratory. DMT is known for its ability to induce profound and intense visionary experiences, often...