If your meetings were half as ambitious as you are, you would never utter the phrase — “This should have been an email” — but they aren’t and instead we keep falling into a predictable trap dictated by nothing more than a calendar that lets us colour code them and automate adding connection links to our invites.
Your meetings can be infinitely better than they are now, all it takes is changing your approach to how you create and run them.
A Compelling Subject
Look in your calendar right now, do any of the meetings on in there excite you to want to attend? Even ones that you’ve created?
Probably not.
Mainly because we put zero thought into what we name our meetings when we should put at least 5 minutes of effort, the title is the first thing people see when they receive your invite, it’s the first opportunity you have to get them excited for what is going to be discussed.
A great Meeting title highlights the problem and the action you’re going to take about the problem.
Here are some examples…
“Discuss Tenant Downtime” OR “Come up with a Solution to Stopping our Tenants from Going Offline”
In the former, you’re mindlessly clicking accept, with the latter, you’re already strategizing on what could be done to stop the tenant from going offline.
Here’s another…
“360 Leadership Review Update” OR “Action Changes from your 360 Leadership Review”
If I am sending the above invite to someone on my team, the first title says — “hey, let’s get together and discuss whatever this is, we may or may not decide anything” — the second title is more direct in that I’m telling you — “we’re going to go through your review, there are probably some changes we might need to make, and because I’ve highlighted ‘your’, you might want to review ahead of time.”
Neither is perfect, but both connote action and responses — i.e., the meeting is there for us to accomplish something.
Leave the Description for Connection Details
I used to be very bad for this, thinking I was smart putting in an agenda of who was…
