Ask HN: What tools do you use to facilitate meetings?
4 comments
We use zoom, and record important meetings.
All meetings must have an agenda and meetings without one can be safely declined. This helps keep meetings focused, and sometimes allows for async comms that can remove the need for the meeting.
Related, if pre-read material is warranted, provide it. Meetings are expensive. Any async work that can happen before the meeting should be front loaded to make the best use of the meeting time.
Appoint or get a volunteer for a secretary for the meeting. This should not be the presenter/facilitator; they are busy. This secretary/note-taker is responsible for emailing out the summary and important meeting details to the group and corrections can be made in replies. Ensure that note taking is spread out and no one person is regularly assigned the secretary role.
Meetings should end with assigned action items, and these are captured initially in the notes. Follow up on those items will usually be owned by a manager or team lead.
For 1:1s, have the reportee do the heavy lifting. They should have an agenda, and they should be taking their own notes.
All meetings must have an agenda and meetings without one can be safely declined. This helps keep meetings focused, and sometimes allows for async comms that can remove the need for the meeting.
Related, if pre-read material is warranted, provide it. Meetings are expensive. Any async work that can happen before the meeting should be front loaded to make the best use of the meeting time.
Appoint or get a volunteer for a secretary for the meeting. This should not be the presenter/facilitator; they are busy. This secretary/note-taker is responsible for emailing out the summary and important meeting details to the group and corrections can be made in replies. Ensure that note taking is spread out and no one person is regularly assigned the secretary role.
Meetings should end with assigned action items, and these are captured initially in the notes. Follow up on those items will usually be owned by a manager or team lead.
For 1:1s, have the reportee do the heavy lifting. They should have an agenda, and they should be taking their own notes.
Was there some blog post or podcast or tweet about this recently telling people to improve the experience? I have replied to two very similar Ask HN posts yesterday and the day before it.
Three Ask HN about the same problem in a tight time interval. I wonder what's triggering these.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26181362
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26173158
Three Ask HN about the same problem in a tight time interval. I wonder what's triggering these.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26181362
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26173158
> Are there any specific tools that you use to keep on top of different action items coming out of these meetings?
Jira. Any action item becomes a Jira issue with my name on it... so I never forget about it. I never rely on meetings (or recording of meetings), I rely on well written Jira issues. If there is an issue that is not well written and self contained, then I just ask for clarifications. Easy.
Jira. Any action item becomes a Jira issue with my name on it... so I never forget about it. I never rely on meetings (or recording of meetings), I rely on well written Jira issues. If there is an issue that is not well written and self contained, then I just ask for clarifications. Easy.
I use a simple Word or Google Doc to keep notes.
I label action items as TODOs and it's up to people to track theirs and get them done.
You can't solve a lack of follow up with tools.
I label action items as TODOs and it's up to people to track theirs and get them done.
You can't solve a lack of follow up with tools.
As I'm sure everyone here can relate, a lot of the pandemic time in the IT sector has been just flooded with meetings. All of them virtually over Zoom and Google Meet, of course.
From my side, my week is mostly spent managing and juggling projects of different sizes, so I'm in and out of meetings pretty much all day. For context, these are everything from grooming sessions to design reviews to 1-on-1 meetings.
We tend to record meetings and then come back to them later, especially if it's some sort of session between product, design and engineering. I've used tools like Otter.ai to record and transcribe these meetings, but that's just one part of it. I didn't like Otter because it didn't fit in with my other workflows and was just another tool in the pipeline that was expensive and caused friction.
Apart from video recordings, I tend to grab notes using Bear, I've also tried Notion. This is all fine, but it's just a lot of work and I found that I can't be too focused on the meeting if I'm trying to grab all the notes and then there's definitely items that get missed.
I wanted to see how does the HN crowd deal with this?
Are there any specific tools that you use to keep on top of different action items coming out of these meetings?
Disclosure: I am bouncing around some ideas on how to improve this process, but I wanted to get thoughts from a wider group.
Thanks!