“In this age of wireless Internet and mobile email devices, having an effective meeting or working session is becoming more and more difficult. Laptops, Blackberries, Sidekicks, iphones, and the like keep people from being fully present. Aside from just being rude, partial attention generally leads to partial results. Multi-tasking is a myth (and there are lots of other articles corroborating Merlin’s points). This is especially damaging in highly collaborative and interdisciplinary fields like UX. Here at the office, we’ve begun to make most of our meetings ‘topless’ (i.e. no laptops allowed). I’ve gone a step further by trying to ban any form of networked communication from the working meetings I put together. While my colleagues here at Adaptive Path have been tolerant of my eccentricities, it’s not so easy when working with clients whose companies have a culture of being always connected and checking. So, I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve picked up for getting people to put down their Crackberries and actually do some work.”

“I recently spoke at Yahoo! about the book, and, for this presentation, I adapted the Agenda Detection and Meeting Creatures chapters into a piece about how I assess agendas and people in the first 10 minutes of any meeting.

Early on in the presentation, I asked the audience, ‘What are the things you are supposed to do to make a successful meeting?’ First hand: ‘Make sure everyone closes their laptop.’ Yes. Full agreement from me. If you’re sitting in my meeting and your laptop is open, I promise, I swear — you are giving me half of your attention. Maybe less.”

“Do you have trouble keeping up with meetings because you can’t take notes as fast as the speaker talks? If you do jot down some thoughts and ideas, by the time you re-read your notes they make no sense? If this sounds like you, a meeting mind map may be just what you need. Here is a quick start guide that will give you some pointers and a printable template you can use to get off to a great start with mind mapping.”

“Do you stagger out of meetings moaning how you hate, hate, hate meetings? Do you yearn for anything — earthquake, hurricane, building collapse — to get out of the meeting you’re in? Do meetings have to be so awful?

The bad meetings always stand out in my memory, but actually, I’ve attended many good meetings, as well. They had a few things in common.”

“It’s no mystery that we’re meeting averse, but here’s another reason why we think meetings are toxic: There’s no such thing as the one-hour meeting.

If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time.”

“Meeting management tends to be a set of skills often overlooked by leaders and managers. The following information is a rather ‘Cadillac’ version of meeting management suggestions. The reader might pick which suggestions best fits the particular culture of their own organization. Keep in mind that meetings are very expensive activities when one considers the cost of labor for the meeting and how much can or cannot get done in them. So take meeting management very seriously.”

“Boardroom I have a confession to make…I don’t like meetings. I realize I’m not alone. This list is probably the making of a ‘meeting manifesto’ but for now…it’s just a list. Let the thoughts begin.”

“In the Star Wars movie’s famous bar scene you knew, by their appearance, what zany character was sitting beside you. Each character had a distinctive look. Yet in business meetings you may have no idea about the group of characters with whom you’re meeting. That’s because their normal outward appearances belie often troublesome behavior. Want to learn more about the crazy cast of characters you’re likely to encounter in your business meetings?”

“Starting and stopping on time is easy. One person with power simply has to decide to care, the rest follows. Having recently survived a tragicomic 8 way international conference call, an experience worthy of the 4th level of hell, I’m here to offer 5 honest tips that would have saved the day.”

“Because the meetings were so long, someone on the team suggested we institute ’stand up meetings.’ Instead of sitting at a traditional conference table, we took the chairs out of the room and ran meetings while standing on our feet. Well, the length of the meetings DRASTICALLY dropped…”

“Most gurus and teachers spend their time telling people what to do. But if you’re already over-stretched and facing an unending future of still more pressure, that’s not likely to appear palatable. Here’s how NOT doing things can help even the most stressed person find ways to improve their working life.”

“People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.”

“…while having fewer meetings is definitely the way to go in many workplaces, eliminating all meetings is not an option in today’s team-based work environment. This means that having good meetings become essential… If we really want open, fun, creative, participative meetings we need to go beyond the standard advice and venture into slightly-weird-land. Here are five easy ways to do it.”

“There are lots of rules for running a good meeting – always have an agenda, start on time, make sure no one is hungry. But this rule is more important than all others: Be a cheerleader for your objectives. When you run a meeting you have an objective and you are trying to convince everyone else to help you get there. Here is a list of five types of meetings and how to run them.”

“I spend most of my work-life in meetings. Note-taking is a survival skill. Yet, I am surprised at how few people bother to take notes in meetings. Those who do sometimes express frustration at how ineffective the exercise seems to be. In this post, I’d like to expound on why I think you should take notes in meetings and then offer a few suggestions on how to do it better.”