Hi, Cal. My name is Jeff. I work as a chief of staff in the R&D org at a large tech firm. In my role, I take many, many meetings each week with a wide range of stakeholder teams and individuals and leads. Many of these meetings recur over time, so I maintain agenda documents to help me come to those meetings prepared, capture notes, as well as action items.

Ultimately, this adds up to a pretty decent amount of overhead, and I'm not sure it's an optimal way to approach agendas and notes for future reference and the capturing of action items that eventually flow into my main system. I'd love any thoughts you have on how you approach meeting prep, how you capture notes or decide whether notes are worth capturing over time, and any takeaways when you work with so many different collaborating teams and stakeholders.

Thanks so much for the podcast and all the terrific books and articles that you've authored over the years. They've been both inspirational and a really big help to me personally. Well, when it comes to a meeting-heavy schedule, I tend to believe that processing is actually a more important and more efficient way of making sense of meetings than prep.

So let's put these two things in the contrast. Prep is about what you do in advance. Let's put together these agenda documents. Let's have all the information, this document. We can then be the place where the notes ultimately reside, et cetera. Let's make sure that we come into the meetings and what we're going to talk about.

That's important. But we often, I think, neglect the time after the meeting to make sense of everything that happened. And so to me, if you had to choose just one thing to add to your meeting schedule to help keep your arms around all of these things, it would be this rule that I've talked about often that when you schedule a meeting, as part of that meeting, you schedule immediately after it time for processing it.

And that goes right on your calendar, so that time is now captured. So if you have a meeting from 1 to 1:30, you schedule 1 to 1:45. And you delineate on your calendar 1:30 to 1:45 is for processing. So now that time is taken. No one can take that with another meeting.

You're not available to 1:45. Now, in that processing time, you say, I need to close every single loop that was opened in this meeting. Now you're flexible. Some meetings, you just need to get things into your existing systems. You don't need an extra infrastructure here of shared agenda documents where notes and tasks go.

Because I'll tell you what, the other people aren't going to look at them. Unless they work for you and you force them, they're not going to look at those things. So you might just be putting this into your systems. Reminder on my calendar, a task in my task list, update my weekly plan, et cetera.

When you do have systems, maybe there's particular types of meetings that happen recurringly, and you have some sort of task board for keeping track of what's going on with this project. That's fine. You can update those systems then after that meeting is done. So prep is important. And I think we put a lot of attention on prep.

We hear a lot of stories like Bezos at Amazon requiring you to write these really to-the-point memos before he will attend a meeting where it's incredibly clear, this is what this meeting is about. This is why we need to have a meeting here, the decisions that need to be made.

Here's all the relevant information that you can read beforehand. I think that's all great, and where that's relevant, do that. But we don't spend nearly enough time on how do you close those loops. Because the thing that's going to kill you is if you go from meeting to meeting to meeting, don't get a close to loop from one before you start the next.

It all piles up, and it becomes very stressful and very anxiety producing. And you lose things, and they get jumbled, and your energy gets lost, and your effectiveness as an executive is going to plummet. So remember, a meeting has two parts. The part that everyone knows about, because everyone's in the same space for a certain period of time, and the part that immediately follows, where you are by yourself making sense of everything that was just discussed.

Don't neglect that second part. I think you're going to find that you're able to handle these meetings with much more cognitive agility. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)