Meetings. Not a day goes by that you’re invited to a meeting, planning for one, avoiding it, or thinking about it. Here are some useful articles that tackle meeting efficiency:
How to Properly Wrap Up a Meeting
If you don’t take down meeting minutes, you’ll hate yourself
A Beginner’s Guide to Mind Mapping Meetings at Lifehacker
If you’re looking into mind mapping meetings, Mindjet has a Meeting Management Template you can download here.
10 Tips for Improving Your Appointment Setting Skills at Lifehack
Offer People Reasons to Love Your Remote Meetings at InfoQ
Photo Credit: Image from Celine Roque  from Blue Rabbit Media

No, you don’t do it with scissors and tape just like the image on the left indicates. A meeting wrap-up is basically the summary, the last part of the meeting where the people are ready to pack up their stuff and leave. With everyone watching the clock at this point, you need to bring the meeting to an end. Here’s how you can do that well:
Make sure that all the listed attendees are still there. Oh you know why. You’ve probably excused yourself at least once in your life during a meeting to “go to the …read more

Almost all Some meetings are a complete waste of time. You can easily identify this kind of meeting if you’re sitting in a conference room, thinking “What a waste of time!”. If this is familiar, keep in mind that you’re also wasting money. Figure out exactly how much money a meeting costs with Meeting Miser.
Basically, this online tool computes how much each attendee is paid by the hour, letting you know how many precious dollars your company is throwing away spending on a particular meeting. Project this tool the next time you’re having a meeting and …read more

You think that mind mapping is just for brainstorming?  Maybe a little document outlining?  Ah how wrong you are.  I think one of the best uses of mind mapping is taking meeting notes.  Gaelen links to Lifehacker’s post on mind mapping meetings and points us all to the MindManager map gallery:
The Mindjet Map Gallery also offers templates for managing meetings. Check out a sample meeting management map located here now. Source: The Mindjet Blog » Lifehacker’s “Beginner’s Guide to Mind Mapping Meetings”
Lifehacker’s examples are pretty basic, and with the crayon colours, enough to make any business person cringe. So let’s look at …read more

CrossLoop is a simple and easy remote access and control application that I’ve tried and used before…with great results.  I got an e-mail from them this week letting me know that some new features were on the way.  Profy.com beat me to the punch with a review…
So what’s new in this release? First of all, now you can share a file with another user while sharing your desktop. I have not heard of any service providing free file transfer without any limitations in file size or type (you can even transfer folders via CrossLoop as well). Files are transferred by …read more

I think this must be one of the key questions facing workers right now.  Silly you think?  Okay, you go into a meeting, you know that information is going to be shared that you need to remember or you are going to be given a task (or three), so how do you record said information and tasks?  Pen and paper?  OneNote or Evernote?  MindManager? Basic text file?  Not easy is it?  Pen and paper is dead simple and you’ve been doing it since elementary school, but paper is easily lost and can’t be searched quickly.
OneNote and Evernote are cool, I’ve …read more

Funny … but so true:

All kidding aside, this is all excellent advice.  Slides with too much information, too many bullet points, animations, or bizarre color schemes force people to focus on your presentation and not you.  Remember you are giving the presentation, not the screen.  This isn’t a movie, it’s a talk.  Sure if you’re putting this online you want more info on slides (since you’re not there), but this isn’t the case.
My rule of thumb is that slides should focus on the key points, about 5, and serve as a reminder for me not be a small novel …read more

No I don’t mean drawing goofy things on a piece of paper. I mean using the site/service Doodle to help you plan a meeting:

So, lately, I’ve found myself informally assuming this role, driving a surprising number of gone-fallow projects just by using Doodle to propose a simple check-in. The bottom line is that this process of getting a stupid 15-minute call on the calendar of several busy people will tell you so more than you can imagine about where you and your project stand. But where’s Doodle enter in to it?
As I’ve mentioned before, Michael Näf’s web application is …read more

How much time do you spend in meetings?  I think “too much” is a universal answer.  Check out Ed Lee’s tips …
where we were bemoaning the amount of time we “wasted” in meetings.
Thankfully, my meeting load isn’t as overbearing as it has been but I can remember getting in to work at 7am, doing actual work until 9am, and then being in various meetings until 4pm before working the requisite overtime to get through the rest of the work I had to do.
I’m not sure how much of that 7 hours was wasted but I’m sure it was a high …read more

Raise you hand, how many of hate setting up conference calls?  Great, thanks.  Now, how many of you have been on conferences calls that you’ve set up (and often paid good money for) and have someone just forget to attend (or you’ve done this yourself)?  Really this should be most of you by now, except for that group in the back who never participates in these questions…no coffee for you at the break ;-)!  While having a conference call number to call into is awesome and is sometimes the only way to get a meeting together (I like using three-way …read more