Today I want to share with you my office setup. I have a special offer for you at the end of this post.

Principles for my design:

• Comfortable

• Healthy and energy

• Professional

Have you ever come to the end of a week and wondered why you didn’t get all the work done you wanted to? If so, it might be time to review your weekly calendar to check if you have too many meetings on it!

Go through next week’s calendar and ask yourself the following questions.

One on ones are always challenging, but they get more difficult when you are remote. One on one meetings are done with colleagues, managers, direct reports, partners, customers, skip level, etc. I will share a few best practices for how to make them more effective online.

This post continues my series on Human Centered Online Meetings. The Working Session online meeting can go very poorly if not done right. Working Sessions create a document such as a project plan or technical design. This post shares the best practices that I’ve discovered to run this online meeting type in a human centered way.

This post shares best practices for running an online broadcast meeting. By broadcast I mean that there are many people in the audience and only a few presenters. Here are some examples:

Conferences

All-hands

Training

Lectures

Today I cover the extremely basic basics of how to run an online meeting. If this is too boring for you then share in the comments on my post on either LinkedIn of FB what pro tips you have.

This week’s posts will give tips on how to run human centered online meetings.

You can use these tips until the robots take over. At that time you can switch to my other blog called “Meeting Tips for Robots.”

I share my night time routine in this post. I have two metrics by which I measure my health…

Depending on the time you have for the meeting, you can either do a shorter or a longer ice breaker. Ice breakers can a have a few purposes. This posts covers both the purposes and a few fun icebreakers you can use in your next important meeting.

Today I dive into why we meet. I have a rather controversial hypothesis. I give lots of examples of why I think it’s true in this post.

Recently I was sitting on zoom… and I got the most urgent need to know if I got my water bill. I opened my email and found nothing! I felt so sad. Why hadn’t any bills come in? This desire to get a bill was a sign that I was on a boring meeting. In this post I’ll share some signs that you are a in a boring meeting, and I would say boring = bad meeting.

How to move a meeting forward that you don’t run. You’ve been there a few times a day, you are in a meeting that isn’t moving forward but you aren’t the facilitator. You might feel frustrated. You might even feel angry. But you don’t have to be helpless. There are things you can do with grace to move a meeting forward.

If you truly want to improve your meetings you need to get feedback. Select the right person to give you feedback on your meetings. Ask a trusted coworker who was in your meeting. Its best to give them a format so that they don’t just respond with a useless message like, “It was good. Thanks.” This post gives a helpful format for gathering feedback.

After a meeting you should follow up on action items. The obvious action after a meeting for you as facilitator is to follow up with anyone who took an action item. There are some issues you might run into plus mental and emotional blocks that sometimes happen. Here is some advice on how to manage each of these situations.

I am giving you a self reflection question to use either at the end of a day or week. Taking the time to self reflect is usually where you will get the biggest boosts to your productivity and happiness. Use these questions to help become a better participant and meeting facilitator.

Today I share my morning ritual which helps me be mentally present for a big day. I hope you enjoy the bio-hacking tools that I’ve tested and refined. This is all based on science!

Ever have a meeting go out of control with a runaway conversation? In this post I describe techniques that work to keep your meeting on track. The question becomes, do you have the courage to use them?

In the final stages of the meeting you need to tie up all the loose ends just like all good movie directors do. Unless it is a European movies where it just ends and you’re like, “What happened???” For meetings those unsatisfying European movie style endings won’t cut it. You need to finish all the storylines and tie up all the character arcs in the last few parts of your meeting.

We saw in Part 1 of sections of the meeting, that the facilitator is like a director of a movie in setting the tone, ensuring that the participants don’t get lost or worst angry! We continue reviewing the sections of the meeting in this post. In part 3 we will finish describing the sections of the meeting.

Meetings have sections just like movies have sections. When we sit down to watch a movie we expect to be taken on a journey. A productive meeting must also follows a structure that keeps the participants on board and focused. In this post I will start to give the meeting structure elements.