My meeting toolbox

Things I do to stay engaged past the twenty minute mark

I struggle with meetings. Always have, probably always will. This was a problem for much of my career because that’s pretty much what management was in my experience.

There are so many different kinds of meetings, too! Round robin status updates, discussion forums, marathon style performance calibrations, project deep dives, white boarding, and postmortems just to get started.

All too long. All hard.

Why? I originally thought that everyone must be in the same boat and that we all just kept having these long meetings because we couldn’t think of an effective alternative. There is, certainly, a fair bit of that going on.

But it turns out that some folks are much better at staying focused during meetings than I am. They can enjoy banter and crosstalk without losing track of the conversation. They also just seem to have way more endurance than I do. My personal limit for a group discussion is 20 minutes. This is the point after which I struggle to stay engaged and retain what is being said. Meanwhile I remember talking with a PM and Designer from a past team who passionately argued that 2-hours was the preferred duration for a project kick-off because that’s how long it took to actually get anything done. I practiced my box breathing as they scheduled a 2.5 hour block for our group of a dozen or so.

To be clear, I don’t think my PM and Designer’s stamina is typical. Mine isn’t either, but I suspect most people (or at least most engineers) are a little closer to my position on the meeting endurance spectrum. Maybe you lost the thread of conversation a quarter of the way through the last discussion and spent the remaining three quarters desperately batting through the fog of your own disengagement. At the end you, quite possibly, had no idea what any of these action items referred to, only that they had been tagged with your name next to them.

That is not, of course, what an effective meeting or general use of time looks like for anyone.

Long meetings have been a challenge for me since always and, like I said, the management track is chock full of them. So I have my meeting toolbox, the strategies that allow me not just to get through the meeting but to turn it into the kind of discussion that I can deeply engage with. Those strategies are:

• Do your homework

• Take notes and

• Volunteer to facilitate

Do your homework

One of the hardest things about meetings for me is the time it takes to get up to speed. If I’m not adequately familiar with the topic under discussion then I just end up treading water the whole time. All my mental bandwidth is spent on trying to keep up with what’s being said instead of actually participating.

This is unpleasant so I try to build context beforehand. No winging it. I start by always reading whatever information is available within the meeting invite itself. Ideally the person who created it has included an agenda with goals. If the meeting owner hasn’t done this then I reach out and ask for them. Not having this makes it more likely that the meeting will be a waste of everyone’s time, not just mine.

I also ask the meeting organizer to provide access to any relevant documents if they didn’t already. Chances are if I read the materials closely enough and the meeting is, in fact, relevant to me in some way, then I will come away with a few thoughts. I notice questions that I have as I go and flag for discussion those which are still unanswered when I’m done. If I find myself disagreeing with something then I jot that down, too. I bring it all with me to the meeting.

This exercise allows me to:

• Build context ahead of time so that I don’t have to do it on the fly.

• Increase my own interest and engagement with the topics we’ll be discussing.

• Generate questions and other thoughts to bring to the meeting.

• Free up mental cycles so I can participate in live discussion. No more treading water; I can swim laps with everyone else.

Take notes

I actually have two different note-taking modes. The first one is court stenographer style note-taking; this is where I type out every sentence that I hear. This is my oldest and least frequently used strategy for staying engaged during long discussions. It dates back to 7th grade History class and forms the lowest strata of my listening skills.

I mostly don’t recommend doing this for reasons that are hopefully obvious. I only use this version of note-taking when I have absolutely no idea what people are talking about. The subject area is completely foreign to me and I have no starting point from which to build my understanding. I don’t even know what questions to ask. I write down everything I hear in order to avoid zoning out and so that I can go figure out the right questions later. Using an AI tool or other automated scribe would defeat the purpose; typing everything out is the only thing anchoring me to this discussion. Mario Teaches Typing for the win.

The other type of note-taking I do is the build an outline kind. This is where I actually think about what is being said (!) and write up my notes as if I were drafting an outline for an essay.

Some speakers carefully structure their points ahead of time and maintain tight control of the discussion. Most people, though, start strong and then end up meandering a bit. That flow is punctuated by interruptions and various detours. This is all quite normal and comfortable for natural conversation but that’s not helpful to me when we’re well into my zombie zone. The essay outline approach allows me to create a scaffolding for that conversation, making it easier for me to understand and retain what is being discussed.

Another way of thinking about it is this: let’s say you have a day off in a fun town. You talk to your friend who spent a long weekend in this town recently and they tell you all about it: first they pulled into the train station, then they got to their hotel, then they took a shower because there was no A/C on the train, then they asked the person at the desk for suggestions about what to do (they were so nice! It turns out their sister lives in the same state as your cousin!), then they got questionable coffee at a store on the corner, then they got lost in the park, then they found a funky used bookstore, then back to the hotel for more realistic walking shoes (they got lost again), then…

This narrative is not very helpful for you as written. What you need is a guide. It might look like this:

Tips for visiting Fun Town

• Name of train station: Fun Town Crossing

• Recommended hotel: Snazzy Place $$

• Things to do:

  • The Very Big Park

  • Funky Books

• Food:

  • NOT Silly Beans

  • Henry’s Gyro’s

• Pack:

  • Good walking shoes

  • Light clothes for the train

That’s what your notes are - they are a digestible guide to the discussion you had as opposed to an account of the winding path you took.

Finally, even if I never look back at what I wrote, simply going through this process keeps me tuned in. I can’t write this kind of note without paying close attention. As a result I’m not just more engaged in the meeting, I’m also way more likely to retain what was said afterward.

Meeting facilitation

Meeting facilitation is like bringing out the big guns for me. I am pretty much guaranteed to stay engaged and track the conversation if I’m the one guiding it and keeping folks on target. Meeting facilitation deserves its own post, but these are some of the things I do when facilitating that directly improve my ability to engage:

• Point out when we’ve wondered off topic and keep track of time. It’s ok if this happens so long as the team is aware of it. They can decide whether it is more important to pursue the current thread of conversation, take it offline, or drop it entirely.

• Highlight ambiguity. Ambiguity breeds confusion and can make people think they’re on the same page when they aren’t. Clean it up on the spot.

• Flag it when folks talk past each other. Everyone, despite best intentions, will misunderstand each other at some point during the conversation. It is much easier for a third party to notice this from the outside looking in than it is for the participants themselves. Pause the conversation when you see this happen, take a few minutes to help both parties get on the same wavelength, and resume.

• Call out and assign action items. Make sure the assignee actually knows what is expected of them.

• Give everyone their time back. If everything has been covered then that’s it, the meeting is over.

• The great thing about facilitation is that you don’t actually have to be the designated meeting facilitator in order to do it. Anyone can and should point out that two speakers are talking past each other or that the discussion appears to have fallen into a rabbit hole. Don’t wait for permission, just (politely) go for it - turn the meeting into something that actually works for you.

Recap

My primary goal in writing this post was to help others who struggle with meeting endurance to get the most out of their time. Hopefully, though, you noticed that each strategy listed here also contributes to better meeting culture overall. Clear goals and agenda items make for a more efficient and targeted discussion. Structured notes keep everyone organized when you share them live with the team. Strong facilitation focuses the discussion so that you avoid all the things that tend to happen in meetings by default - rabbit holes, miscommunication, and the inefficient use of time.

Thank you for reading! Do you have any favorite strategies to share? Has your organization gone meeting-lite? Please share it all in the comments!