[muffa]

What worked the best in my experience is to have an agenda. Having an agenda with time-slots for each bullet point makes it easier for everyone to get their voices heard instead of having a lone ranger talking nonstop about their favorite subject for 1h non-stop.

In short: - Have an agenda with time-slots - The meeting organizer is the one in charge of sticking the meeting to the agenda. When someone goes off-topic steer the conversation back to the topic. Be strict and ruthless about this (In a nice way ofc :) ) - Avoid the small-talk that can be done before or after the meeting, not everyone in a meeting wants to know about how many goals you're kid score this last Saturday. - Take notes for each bullet-point in the agenda, actions points could be make a jira-task for this, contact John Doe about budget changes etc. - After the meeting share the meeting notes with everyone, tag people in the notes so they get re-informed of their tasks after the meeting.

That usually does the trick for me, this template can ofc not be applied to all kinds of meetings, read-the-room.

[majewsky]

> Avoid the small-talk that can be done before or after the meeting, not everyone in a meeting wants to know about how many goals you're kid score this last Saturday.

With all the pandemic-induced social isolation, we saw the small-talk creep into meetings more and more in our team. What works well for us is to have a dedicated recurring meeting just for small-talk. We have it twice a week in the morning, when everyone is just drinking their first coffee of the day and not up to much yet anyway, so it doesn't seem to be taking too much productive time away.