Supercharge your meetings with clear outlines, focused audience and structured minutes using the Triple A 🔋 Meeting framework.

Too Much Zoom

As the global pandemic and lockdown has taken over working behaviours with constantly shifting habits becoming “the new norm”, it’s quite common for many of us to struggle through endless online meetings (arguably introducing “Zoom fatigue” to our professional lexicon).

We’ve had to adjust our working styles with a range of common pitfalls taking over our calendars;

  • when you’d typically get off your seat to chat with someone about something relevant, you’d end up booking in a quick meeting titled “catch up”
  • as a collaborator, those “weekly meeting” invites start taking over your calendar
  • as a leader, the quick “update” meeting invite is so much easier to get key people together

Go on – go check your calendar now to see how many you’ve got. Also, have a look to see how many have no clear description or outline? I can imagine it’s more than one.

Triple A (AAA) Meetings 🔋

This is where I propose the Triple A Meeting framework:

Attendees

Make sure you’ve got the right people invited and everyone else knows who’s coming

Agenda

Outline a clear point to the meeting along with areas it covers. Consider using the calendar summary for the meeting outcome and calendar description for breakdown of each area covered.

Actions

Any specific activities that should be followed up by attendees, ideally with any carried over from previous meetings. Make sure to send the actions out to all attendees straight after the meeting too.

By adopting this model, you ensure that the meeting you’re having is outcome-driven with a clear outline and focused on the key people to attend.

Extra Charge ⚡️

You might find it awkward fitting all the agenda minutes and actions directly in the calendar item – this is where it’s worth using your preferred online document storage (like Confluence or Google Docs).

Create a document and link to it from the calendar event.

That way it’s easier to share before the meeting (allowing for agenda contributions prior to the meeting), live scribing notes during the meeting and tracking actions afterwards.

For added alliteration, you can also extend your Audience with an Apologies subheading for any attendees who were unable to make it. This helps set context for any outstanding actions along missing outcomes requiring their input.

/end battery puns