How to change your day with meeting plans

  • August 17, 2020
  • Work

I recently had a day where I had about 10 different meetings - all on different subjects. I knew that I would struggle to be productive in each of them if I turned up for them unprepared and had to switch subjects each time.

To solve this I created a simple document and added a heading for each meeting. Under each heading I made a simple bullet list of everything I wanted to cover or possibly discuss in the meeting. In just over 10 minutes I had planned for all my meetings that day.

At the start of each meeting I open the document and as the meeting progresses I strike through each item (alt-shift 5 in Google Docs). I also add additional notes as it progresses. By the end I can see if there is anything I have missed and still need to cover. Once the meeting is over I cut the meeting notes and paste them at the bottom of the document - so not only do they help me in the meeting, I now have an archive of all my meeting notes.

I now start my day by reviewing my calendar and making notes for any meetings I have coming up. I will also sometimes make notes for meetings I know may happen at some point in the future so I can capture thoughts at they happen. This simple step has really improved my contributions to meetings.

Random Posts

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

  • February 8, 2018

I was really looking forward to this book as I had listened to a podcast where they explained the ideas behind it. The two authors run a design course in Stanford that gets massively oversubscribed and has a huge impact on those who take it by looking at life as a design problem. The aim is to come up with lots of possible routes for your life that could be awesome and then design a path to achieve one of them. If that doesn’t work you can use the same approach to look for new opportunities. I have not yet made the time to do the exercises and these are absolutely key to getting the most out of it.


Read More

The ultimate in debugging

  • November 3, 2024

Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn’t been used in over forty years!


Read More

The unseen impact of the little trade-offs

  • April 27, 2018

I found this article to be a very astute observation that it can be all the “little trade-offs” that can add up to cause issues. The article highlights it from the perspective of a leader who can make small decisions, usually around putting something off or taking a short cut, that can add up to impact their work and those around them.


Read More