We have all been there. Meetings that drag on forever where nothing gets done. If you are on Twitter for a little while during office hours, messages such as “when is this meeting going to end” or “bored out of my mind in this meeting” will start popping up again and again. Meetings can be really useful, productive and inspiring but they can also be mind numbingly boring and achieve nothing but the wasting of time.

Here are 3 tips to improve this situation and to take your meetings to the next level.

1. Always have an agenda stating

a) The purpose of the meeting
b) The discussion points with exact timings

Having an agenda will ensure that you have a framework for the meeting. Always start the meeting on time, stick to timings of agenda items and finish on time. Elect one of the meeting participants as timer to help with this, agree on a 2 minute warning before the time is up so that you have a chance to wrap up the topic, before moving onto the next item.

2. Never leave a meeting without setting a next action. If there are several items on the agenda, make sure you have a next action for each of them. The next action could be decided during the 2 minutes at the end of the allotted time. It could either be something that needs to happen before the next meeting, or it could be the decision to set a meeting about this topic at a different time, as the time allotted wasn’t enough to come to a satisfactory conclusion.

3. Mobile devices have become more and more invasive in everyday life and this includes business meetings. If the meetings are tightly scheduled and always finish on time, there is no need to be constantly available to the outside world. Make your meetings a mobile free zone. Concentrate on what each other is saying and contribute to the meeting 100%. There is nothing more annoying than having to repeat yourself because a meeting participant was concentrating on sending a text rather than on what was being said.

The same goes for laptops, quite often emails are being sent during meetings and presentations when the participants should be paying attention and participate. There is really no need for any technology in the room apart from the presentation device. If everyone is participating 100% in the meeting, productivity is bound to increase.

If someone is really waiting for an important call then let them leave the meeting to deal with it.

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If you implement these 3 strategies, your meeting productivity is going to improve dramatically.

Add a comment below and let me know how you are getting on with this.