How to Keep Your Meetings Focused: 4 facilitation methods to help prevent meetings that suck 

How to keep overbearing voices, distracting devices, and interesting tangents from derailing your meetings. [Coach.me] [View this email in your browser]( How to Keep Your Meetings Focused Four facilitation methods to help prevent meetings that suck Meeting facilitation is often overlooked as a leadership skill, but learning a few techniques can help you make the most of everyone's time and keep overbearing voices, distracting devices, and interesting tangents from derailing your meetings. Next time you call a meeting, use good facilitation to give it structure and keep it on track towards your goal. Below is an excerpt from our book, [Meeting Mastery: The Coach.me Leader's Guide to Meetings with Impact]( to give you four easy but extremely effective facilitation techniques specifically for adding focus. (The book includes other techniques for encouraging diversity of input, making group decisions, and more!) In service, Coach Tony Facilitiation Methods for Focus, from [Meeting Mastery: The Coach.me Leader's Guide to Meetings with Impact]( Parking lot Use this when: ▪ You need to keep the focus on your agenda. ▪ You need a place to track off-topic items so you can come back to them another time. How to do it Define a section of white board, a flipchart page, or a document for recording parking lot items. When someone brings up an off-topic item that threatens to derail the meeting, acknowledge that it’s an important item worthy of discussion, and add it to the parking lot. Gently remind participants that your meeting has a different focus, but reassure them that the item is held to the side for later discussion. Sometimes you may discuss these items later in the meeting, but some of them may be more appropriate for other types of follow-up. If you’re a fan of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, you’ll recognize that this is his same principle of capturing ideas and information to use later at a more appropriate time. This reduces the stress of feeling like you need to remember each item and lets you focus back on the present. There may be disagreement about what belongs in the parking lot. Just keep refocusing on the meeting’s purpose. Kill the Devices Use this when: ▪ You’re working with people who are often distracted by their cell phones. ▪ People are doing other work and not paying attention to the meeting. How to do it: Remove the distraction of laptops by banning them to keepparticipants engaged in the meeting. When participants don’t have the distraction of a laptop to fall back on, they are more likely to notice discussions wandering off-topic, and keep the meeting moving along. If people look bored without their laptop, maybe they should be excused from the meeting. Try asking participants to close their laptops for the duration of the meeting. If they need to look something up, they can do so, but then close the laptop afterwards. Of course, if you have someone taking detailed notes for the meeting, they may need their laptop open. Even so, consider taking notes on paper, or on the whiteboard, and then transferring to your laptop after the meeting. If phones are an issue, have a basket (or just a table) at the meeting door with post-it notes and a marker. Each person should write their name on a post-it, attach it to their phone, and drop their phone into the basket where it stays until the end of the meeting. (Suggest that they silence the phone first.) This is a technique most famously used by the White House. If you’re serious about asking people to do this, you need to be certain you’re not wasting their time in the meeting. Do this if you need the group to focus…not as a power play. Use a timekeeper Use this when: ▪ You need to limit the amount of talking done by any single person during a discussion. ▪ You want to hear from as many voices as possible and give everyone a fair chance to speak. How to do it: Have a person agree to be the timer. You may want to give them a cardboard sign or some other signal they can hold up. Announce the amount of time each person will have to express their thoughts. As each person speaks, the timekeeper simply keeps an eye on the time allotment and signals when their time is up. The speaker is expected to wrap up their thoughts and the stop talking so another person can speak. If someone wants to say more, they need to wait until everyone who wants to speak has had a chance. If there’s time on the agenda, you can let people “double-dip” and speak again if you like. If there are real issues or concerns that people may need to talk to someone about for a longer period of time, be sure you recommend appropriate ways they can do that. Time-box the agenda Use this when: ▪ You have a hard time completing meetings in the allocated time. ▪ Meandering focus or over-long discussions are a problem. How to do it: Assign start and end times to sections of your agenda, and let the team know that the meeting will move on at those times. Have a timekeeper keep time for each section, and give a 2-minute warning that the time slot for the next section of the agenda is about to start. If a decision needs to be reached, you may need to schedule another meeting for it. If you’re having trouble fitting everything into your agenda, the problem might really be a poor agenda. Time-box an agenda when you need to keep people moving, not to try to squeeze in more meeting content than can reasonably fit. This is a technique to use for chronic bad meetings. In meetings as in life, sometimes things come up and the focus of the meeting naturally changes. The point here isn’t to keep your meetings marching along to the clock just for the sake of punctuality…it’s to help the team make better use of meeting time. Coach.me: 5 Ways to Be Coached [Self-coaching](. Free Coach.me is the world’s best goal tracking app—and it's completely free to use on the web at [Coach.me]( or download it here: [Apple]( or [Android](. [Heavy Mental.]( $20/month Train your mind the way an athlete trains their body. This program is focused on productivity and happiness via cutting edge research and high-leverage exercises to help you make major life improvements. This is a coaching group personally lead by Coach.me Founder and CEO, Tony Stubblebine. [Individual Habit Coaching](. $19.99/week or $64.99/month Get accountability, support, and advice to help you nail any new habit. Your coach checks in with you via private chat about once a day. Get a free 3-day trail with any coach! 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