Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die

Re:Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die by jacques_chester on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @07:23AM (#3589712)

Meeting formats vary. The simplest things you need, though are:

1. Metadata -- who was there, start time, end time.

2. What was discussed. Regular reports are typical.

3. What decisions were made.

4. Who will carry out which decisions.

It's common to see 3&4 in one of two formats:

1. Interpolated. "Motion: Jack to install new monitoring package. Moved Jill, Seconded Wei Li. Passed."

2. Appended. A list at the bottom of "action items". The UCC minutes I linked above take this approach, which has the readability advantage.

I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done.

Yes, absolutely. I saw meetings abused during my student politics days. Some really dramatic stuff.

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Re:Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die by amirmc on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @07:36AM (#3589741)

Another, often overlooked point is when things need to be done by.

Also, I got in the habit of putting a table of actions right at the front of the minutes (after the preamble of time/date/attendees etc). It was the first thing people would see on opening the doc.

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Re:Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die by jacques_chester on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @07:40AM (#3589750)

That's a nifty idea. Mind if I pinch it in future?

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Re:Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die by amirmc on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @10:20AM (#3590297)

I'm flattered. Below is an (anonymised) example of the last set of minutes I took. Hope you find it useful.

PDF: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.pdf

DOC: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.doc

Edit: I once toyed with the idea of trying to write an iPad app that can automagically structure a set of minutes for you. It would have been a way for me to learn iOS and do something useful for myself at the time.

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Re:Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die by jacques_chester on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @04:55PM (#3591958)

Excellent example document.

I toyed with a similar idea for an application, but this was about a decade ago when my (most excellent) secretary grumbled about my nitpicking.

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Re:Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die by Tsagadai on Wednesday February 15, 2012 @01:55AM (#3593369)

Experiencing meetings getting abused is certainly a worthwhile life experience. I too was fairly political at university and I saw great depth and planning go into getting particular outcomes from meetings for nefarious ends. You begin to notice signs and mannerisms that give away when someone is trying to be a jerk or working in cahoots with others to stack motions or derail discussion to get in a sneaky amendment or rejection. It's a game of strategy, really.

It is such a valuable experience because eventually you have to work with people who mess with meetings for a living (politicians, bureaucrats, middle managers in large firms, and the list goes on). Knowing their tricks puts you one step ahead.

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