Meetings Don’t Have to Be An Eye Roll

One of my least favorite things is going to meetings.  Sometimes you have a good meeting and you’ll walk away with a much better understanding of the task at hand. However, I find that the majority of these structured get togethers are painfully unfocused and disorganized, especially if they’re on the phone. Even when there is a clear plan of action for a meeting, people will often go off on tangents discussing their vacation plans or the weather. I get it, it’s just human nature but it’s still not productive!

I recently stumbled across do.com, a website that helps you keep meetings on track. Do.com creates a visual timeline of your meeting that everyone can follow. The service also allows you to set an agenda, define what outcomes you want for you meeting and track the followups. Making it more likely that you will leave with that ‘good meeting’ feeling.

I was curious to see if it could actually improve the quality of my meetings, so I tried it few weeks ago for a business planning call that I had set up for my book launch.

Here are some of my thoughts on the pros and cons of using this service:

Pros

• I liked that I could go in ahead of time and plan out everything that we need to talk about. Plus it was all in one place, which ensures that everyone on the call is on the same page.
• I’m able to make notes and figure out what sort of follow-ups need to be made for each item.
• Do.com integrates with Evernote so you can just upload your notes right there afterwords.

Cons

• Unfortunately adding items to the agenda is not as easy and it could be. You have to add the next item to the bottom of the list and then drag it where you want it. I’d much prefer if you could just put things in order as you as you go.
• Also there is no way to assign items to each person. Instead I had to write the person’s name in big letters so that they can see what item was their responsibility. I think a feature to assign tasks would be a huge improvement. That way, once you get off the call, everyone knows who needs to be taking care of what.
• Right now you can only use this service with Gmail but according to the website that will change very soon.  So stay tuned for that.

Listful Thinking is now ready for pre-order.  If buying the book is on your to-do list, pre-ordering is a great help to me.  In the publishing world, pre-orders set the tone for a book and really create buzz with booksellers, media, publishers and book lovers everywhere.  Check “buy Listful Thinking“ off your list today!