 Most meetings are inefficient, massive time suckers, and make you ultimately low-key hit your job. But hey, there is a better way, and you can make your meetings efficient and enjoyable. Here are 10 simple tips for running the most effective and enjoyable meeting of your life. Tenses are, if you've been in a horrible meeting, you've already tried to find solutions for it. And your Google search probably returned advice like, start on time and end on time, create a better agenda. Do you better know taking? And a classic, check if this meeting could have been an email. And while all of this advice is valid, if you've tried to implement it, what you probably noticed is that it's only marginally effective. And it does make your meetings a little bit better, but it doesn't make world of a difference. Your meetings still suck, and they're still super inefficient, and you still hate them. Well, this is because all of this advice is just a Band-Aid fix over a much deeper underlying problem. Why are meetings actually such a drag? Why are they not enjoyable? And why does everyone hate them? Well, the reason is because they create faulty group dynamics and don't take groupthink and team politics into account. So what ends up happening in a conventional meeting is that juniors and introverts are quiet. The loudest person in the room is talking all of the time. No actionable outcomes are produced, and everyone understands the job to be done differently. Meetings like this are deadly to productive work, not just because they're excruciatingly dull to be in, but because they just don't fulfill their main purpose. That is, providing alignment for the team and exact next steps. By now, it should be pretty clear that a better agenda or a better know-taking system are not going to solve this underlying problem. So what will? Well, changing your unstructured open discussion meeting into a workshop. A structured meeting that ensures solid outcomes. Workshops fundamentally change the way collaborative work is done. They replace open-ended unstructured discussions with tools and processes. So groupthink and talking over each other in circles are replaced by uninterrupted ideation. You can check some of the workshop blueprints that we shared over here for a brainstorming workshop and a decision-making workshop. And if you're interested in tips like this and you want to make your work life more enjoyable and productive, you definitely have to subscribe to our newsletter. The link is in the description below. We won't ever, ever, ever spam you. Subscribe now! But if you're just starting to discover workshops and you want to ease your team into them, our best advice would be to try and implement two or three of the tips that we're going to share with you now. Okay, let's dive right in. Our tip number one, a point of facilitator. A facilitator or a workshopper, as we like to call them, is the person who helps keep the meeting on track, calls out the people for discussing things that are off topic and keeps the meeting going. Having a facilitator in a room really frees up the mental capacity of the meeting attendees to focus on the challenge at hand instead of going through the same thoughts meeting after meeting like, should I talk now? Am I supposed to answer this? You can volunteer to facilitate your team's next meeting, a kick-off for a new project, decision-making process for that feature that you've been putting off, or a particularly big clunky challenge. This is also a great career move because once you are seen as the person who can enable teams to their best work and with less annoyance, you are wanted for every team all the time. You become the catalyst for getting work done better. Our tip number two, get the team right. Think about who really needs to be there. You might think inviting as many people as possible will add in valuable opinions, but what it usually ends up doing is just making discussions even more circular and harder to facilitate. The rule of thumb is not having more than seven people per one facilitator. So take the time and think. Does John really need to be in this meeting? Or will an email actually be enough? Our tip number three, sequence your discussions. So don't come in into the meeting and say, hey guys, what do you think about problem X? How should we solve this? This will only divert your meeting into the free discussion form. So how this would work on a macro level is that you divide your meeting into phases. So for example, first you talk about the challenge and then about the solutions and how this would work on a micro level is that first person A talks. Okay. Then after they finished person B talks. I've got it. And then person C. Really? Now this is not a natural way of how humans are used to interact with each other, but what it really does, it allows you to stay on track and not lose your meeting to circular endless discussions. Because if you're in the solution mode, you don't want someone editing in a new challenge on top of the conversation. And if you're discussing challenges, you don't want people randomly sharing their ideas. This will only derail your meeting. Tip number four, visualize your discussions. Because human capacity to take a new information is limited, you need to visualize all of the conversations going on in the meeting. All data, all topics and all ideas. So instead of relying on everyone taking notes on their own, visualize all of the information on post-its, wide board or in a remote collaboration tool. This reduces the possibility of misalignment and allows people to focus on the challenge at hand instead of spending their mental energy on trying to keep all the moving pieces in their heads. So the next time you're in a meeting, grab a marker and start jotting things down on a wide board to really capture them. Tip number five, time box your activities. To avoid discussions spiraling out of control, time box all of the activities in your meeting. So if you need to work on a challenge, set 20 to 30 minutes aside or however much you need and after the time is done, move on to the next steps. So what this does is it forces you to think more efficiently and cut out all the circular discussions. Now, a pro facilitation tip is to make all of the timings fill a little bit too tight so that your brain goes straight into the solution mode instead of idling around. Our tip number six, work alone together. Now, if you've heard of the design sprint, you've heard of this concept and what it does, it allows the groups to ideate without having to battle group sync. So how it works is that the team collaborates together in real time on the same challenge and instead of creating an open discussion of what do you think? But what do you think? What do you think? Instead of exchanging opinions, everyone is ideating on their own and writing their ideas on a sticky note. And what it really does, it allows more quieter people, maybe juniors or introverts in the room to also get their opinions out there. So instead of kicking off your solution mode with something like, hey, so what kind of ideas do we have going on here? Give your team some sticky notes, sharpies, set the timer for five to ten minutes and tell them to write their ideas on a sticky note in silence without talking to each other or discussing anything. This might feel weird the first time you try it because after all, that's not the way people are used to work in meetings together. So to soften the awkwardness a little bit, we advise you to put on some non-distracting tunes in the background. And we actually have a workshop playlist on Spotify that you can use. It will be linked in the description box below. This collaboration techniques really helps reduce group sync and team politics dramatically. So do give it a try. Hey, are you enjoying this video? If so, you will absolutely love our newsletter where we share our best tips on facilitation, workshops and productive work that we just don't share anywhere else. Sign up to it now. The link is in the description below. Now let's dive back in. Our tip number seven, have a parking lot to stop sidetracking discussions. Sometimes the circular discussion is heated and complex, but it's just not relevant to the challenge that you are trying to solve right now. But the thing is, it's hard for people to stop talking if they feel like what they're talking about is important and shouldn't be forgotten. But luckily, there is an easy way to make your participants feel comfortable while simultaneously keep the meeting moving and going. Create a parking lot. If physical space somewhere in your meeting room, this could be a wide board. This could be an empty blank wall or a place in your remote collaboration tool. Well, you will park your ideas for later. So whenever you notice a circular discussion is parking up, which is important, but it's just not relevant to what you're trying to solve right now, you can say something like this. Hey, this is a very important discussion, but it's just outside of the scope of the project. So would you mind writing it down on a post-it and we'll come back to this later? Now for this technique to work, you have to set time aside at the end of each meeting to come back to all of the items in your parking lot. Because otherwise, people won't trust you the next time you try to use this and they won't let go of their ideas and the tool just won't work. So always come back to your items on the parking lot. Our tip number eight, always finish a meeting with a decision. Pick a decider who is going to make the final call after the meeting is done on what the next steps should be to avoid the typical meeting fallacy. Let's discuss this in the follow-up meeting. Because even if you don't come to the final conclusion, there still should be clear next steps defined after the meeting is done. Don't leave the meetings without actionable outcomes, next steps, and a person who's responsible for them. Our tip number nine, use voting to help you make those decisions. Instead of asking the team, what do you guys think we should do? And opening another round of open-ended unstructured discussion, bring voting dots with you and ask your team to silently write their ideas on sticky notes, remember their loan-together method, and then after they done, stick them up on a wall and let them vote anonymously. Now what this does is it takes out the circular discussion and ensures all perspectives are heard. Pro tip, if you have a super important decision, you can make your voting multi-layer. So you have a team vote to register interest and a binding final decider vote. And our final tip number 10, show don't tell. It's hard for people to imagine concepts which are not visualized. To minimize misunderstandings, have something tangible to show every time you talk about a concept or an idea. So the next time you're explaining an exercise or a concept or a workflow, instead of simply describing it with words, have something tangible to show your team. Examples help us understand concepts better because they take ideas from something abstract and give them concrete context. So instead of simply describing your idea with words, maybe show a sketch of what you mean or better yet, a screenshot of a landing page you mean or a video or a recording or do a role play of a particular workflow or client situation to really make the team participants understand what you mean. Make it a rule to point to something that already exists rather than discussing abstract concepts. This will really take interpretation out of the equation and ensure maximum alignment for your team. And there you have it, our 10 best tips on making your meetings more efficient and more enjoyable. Tell us in the comments below which tip will you implement first. If you enjoyed this video, then you will definitely love our newsletter. We share our best tips on workshops and facilitation and just generally loving your work more. So subscribe to it right now. The link is in the description box below. And if you want to see more content like this from us, subscribe and hit the bell button to never miss another video ever again. That's it! The meeting is over and it was amazing because I implemented all the tips. Bye! Bye! See you next time!