Highly Effective Agenda

My previous blogs focused on some basic features and functionality of the OneNote application.  With what I have covered in previous posts, plus what I share in this post, you will have enough knowledge of features and functionality to get valuable results in return.  To be clear though, there are many more features still to learn, some of them very impressive and useful.

I have facilitated thousands of meetings and have poured personal time and passion into improving my meeting facilitation skills.  I have adopted practices from my mentors and I have developed practices of my own. It is my opinion that the most successful agendas include certain meeting specifications as well as agenda items, times and responsibilities to help guide the meeting.

While managing a project in 2004, I discovered OneNote. I saw opportunity to model some personal best practices and began to tweak tags, the agenda, etc. as I learned new tricks for gaining productivity and improving communication.

In Figure 1, below, I have shared my current personal best practice agenda layout. This agenda  layout is proven to be effective for nearly any kind of working meeting. I have validated these practices through thousands of meetings, including meetings within my own company, meetings for my employer, and customer project meetings on consulting engagements.

Figure 1

Of course, when you create your agenda, much of the content will need to be changed in order to meet the requirements of your meeting.  For example, you will need to change the meeting specifications in the header (i.e., the content in the Subject, Date and Location, Attendees, Purpose, and Desired Outcome blocks) to fit your meeting.  You will also need to replace the content in the Start, Owner, and Duration columns within the main body, the part titled "Agenda".

Within the Agenda Item column however, I recommend only changing the "<Key Topic #1>" item by replacing it with the actual key topic of your first key topic.  Then, insert rows for any additional key topics you need for a successful meeting.  As a best practice, however, I'd try to limit the number of <Key Topics> to no more than five (5).

In other words, I recommend that you do include "Introduction", "Announcements", "Wrap-up" and "Adjourn" exactly as they are represented in the illustration.  Adding a maximum of 5 key topics would put your agenda at 9 rows total.  Of course, there are extenuating circumstances that may justify a longer agenda, but it should be a rare occurrence in my opinion.

You may have noticed that, in the content of the Attendee block, I listed participants and added the "Participant" tag.  In my last post, I explained how to customize your tags which include creation of the "Participant" tag.

In future posts, I'll share some great tips and tricks to help you create this effective agenda so fast that you'll think twice before ever having another working meeting without one.

In some cases a completely different agenda style may be more successful. For example, in a meeting where you are pitching a proposal to a prospective customer, you may want an agenda that is integrated into a presentation, or printed as part of a formatted proposal document.  That situation typically often calls for an agenda that is printed or integrated into a presentation slide deck, both of which are outside the scope of this post. Still, this post can be used as guidance for building the agenda.

Stick with me, and I'll keep sharing, in an orderly process, tips and tricks that have taken me years to learn and assemble.