Chances are that you’ll be having more than a couple of meetings scheduled for today. Especially for meetings you organize, the effectiveness of these meetings depends largely on what you do.

A couple of things that could help you to organize better meetings:

• For each meeting, ask yourself if it is really necessary to actually schedule time together. Often, you can get stuff done by using Slack, by sending out an email to a small group of people or by walking up to someones desk.
• Be really selective of who to invite to your meeting.
• In general, I’m trying to build a culture where it is okay for people to decline or excuse themselves from a meeting if they have the idea there is nothing (else) to add or contribute. If you notice someone who is not contributing, valuable time is wasted and it is better for everyone if this person can leave the session.
• Start your meetings on time. Always.
• Have an agenda and share it with the attendees beforehand.
• Make sure decisions are written down. By far the easiest way to do this is by opening an empty email at the start of the meeting, use this as a scratchpad to jot down the decisions made and who should be doing what by a specific date.
• End by wrapping up, reiterating the decisions made and sending out the notes right away. Most importantly: end on time.

This meeting is over.