Meetings frustrate us every day, so why on Earth haven’t we automated them already?
So many aspects in business and personal productivity have been improved thanks to automation. We fully embraced it, too. We even learned to build complicated workflows with IFTTT and Zapier’s recent multi-steps zaps.
I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel like meetings shouldn’t be impossible to fix. So why didn’t we fix them already?
The sheer act of meeting with other people isn’t what’s annoying us. It’s the repetitive tasks surrounding the meetings that get to us. Most of it feels like micro-management, and frankly, who likes micro-managing others?
In the -hopefully near- future, meetings will be automated to reduce our inputs to the bare minimum. Free of these constraints, we’ll have more time to focus on the important stuff, more time to reach common agreements and make the right decisions. We’ll have more energy left to check tasks off our to-do list.
At least that’s what we believe here at Solid, and that’s exactly what we’re working on.
We’re in luck: the boring parts in meetings are the easier ones to automate
A good meeting needs preparation. There’s enough articles out there that tell you to prepare your meetings in advance, so I’ll spare you the explanations. Bottomline is: if people show up unprepared to a meeting, they’ll be less receptive and less effective. This leads to the frustrations and complaints we often hear.
We’re relying on one person, most often the organizer, to take all the repetitive but necessary steps in preparation. Writing the agenda in advance isn’t the worst of it: you’re calling a meeting for a reason, so you might as well write it down. The bad part comes when you need to share it, and get others to add their input.
In truth, this preparation is the first thing to go. Either because “frankly, everyone already knows what the meeting is about” or simply for a lack of time. In other cases, we’ll do it while still complaining at how boring it all is. And the list doesn’t end there.
Our frustrations stem from things we have to do around the meeting itself
Right when the meeting ends is another key moment. Everybody leaves the room, the organizer has a little bit more work to do. Yet again. Meetings should result in concrete plans of actions to be useful. This will only happen if someone makes the effort to write down the summary and send it over to every relevant party involved.
Doing so shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. But we don’t do it all the time. And even when someone does it, how can we be sure the notes accurately represent the conversations that took place?
These are two huge problems. First, not knowing if someone will indeed take notes and send them. Two, allowing inaccurate notes to be passed as truth.
So what could we do?
So many of these things could be handled through automation. Finding the optimal time in everyone’s schedule and sending the invitation. Conducting research on the participants you don’t already know. Collecting relevant background information like shared emails and documents. Building the agenda and reminding participants in advance. Asking them to add their input when needed, or to simply read the agenda instead of blindly going into the meeting.
This way, if you’re meeting with a client, you’ll know about their latest news. Or if you’re in a company meeting, everyone will have a stable basis for new conversation to build upon.
On meeting summaries, we should get everyone to agree on the notes before the meeting ends, knowing that is the copy they’ll receive. To take it one step further, people who weren’t there but who are still interested in the meeting’s discussions should be added in the loop as well. Attending meetings where no input is needed on our part is also a big factor in our general frustration with them.
Although we won’t see machines replace managers anytime soon, they could definitely land a helping hand. Simple reminders would go a long way in unburdening managers’ post-meeting leadership.
Welcoming technology inside the meeting room
Why are we chasing technology outside of meeting rooms? Many companies ban devices from their meeting rooms. It’s as if we’ve tried to make devices relevant during meetings, failed, and gave up. It’s as if smartphones bring distractions we cannot resist.
What about those who want to take notes on their phone rather than on a piece of paper? What about the possibility to erase, correct, edit, rewrite, copy… What about the opportunity to sync notes across all devices and tools? This device ban in meeting rooms may do more harm than good.
Maybe our apps get in the way of discussions. Maybe we’d do better if we had a text editor special-made for meetings. It should allow us to take notes on the go while keeping track of the conversations. It should be visual and flexible enough to fit our style. It should show us the documents it pulled earlier to help our decision-making.
While we’re at it, we can hope for machines to learn from our behavior, and evolve to 1) fit with our schedules and habits, and 2) correct our time-wasting habits for us.
All of this is actually not too far off. You can already let Solid help you prepare, manage and follow up on your meetings. Maybe one day, a fully-functioning AI will do all of it for you.