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Hi everyone. Here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today, I want to share with you five tips to optimize your meetings. Especially in this era of AI, where time is scarce, attention is fragile, and projects move faster than ever. Managing projects has always required alignment, but with so many tools, so many distractions, and so many simultaneous deliverables, meetings have often turned into black holes for productivity. So here are for me, the best practice to turn your meetings in real project accelerators. Tip number one, before the meeting, meetings need to be short and well-focused. Spending too much time in meetings kills your concentration and freezes progress. Instead of trying to solve everything in one endless call, split it by topic. It's much, much better to have 2 or 3, 4 short meetings than one, that takes the whole day. Because most of the time these long meetings, they tend to become chaotic and at the end they do not solve anything, I love, as I said many times, I love this concept of the daily scrum stand-up meetings where people stand up, they meet very quickly, and they move extremely fast. The second thing that you should do before planning with clarity is to ask if the meeting is even necessary.
Why? Not everything requires a meeting. Many decisions can be handled asynchronously through email or Slack, for example. I use a lot of Slack, and Slack is for me a massive, powerful tool because it's basically a super WhatsApp where many times I can discuss a single topic, I can put a problem in the project and I can start discussing with the team, and I don't need to have a meeting for that. So it's a very easy tool. And these many times a decision on Slack can update Asana or Notion and make your life much more productive. When a meeting is truly, truly needed, you should share a clear agenda in advance and define the goal. This keeps the conversation on track and ensures people will come prepared. There is nothing worse than someone saying, Oh, I was not prepared. I don't have this information to discuss. So I want to anticipate and say, look, this meeting we plan to discuss that supplier that is late, so bring everything you can to discuss that specific problem during the meeting. Look, use AI to record and summarize most of the time. Tools like Cloude, Fireflies, Otter, and Spinach. They act as a true copilot in our meetings. Personally, I use it and I said this many times, and people who know me, I use Claude and I'm extremely happy.
And one important point, I'm not sponsored by Claude, okay? So I'm just a customer and a very happy customer. And I use Claude for pretty much everything. And I created a personalized summary for my meetings, including actions, and this. So it's much faster for me than any, I would say, a note taker or paper. You know, it's just magic many times. Okay. So what is important is that you focus on participating rather than taking notes and projects with multiple stakeholders. Having this type of record is gold. It's pure gold. Another thing that is important for you during the meeting, assign a facilitator and let AI support the work. The facilitator will ensure the group stays on the agenda, tracks time, and makes decisions, but I can now assist with that. Some platforms detect tasks automatically, suggest follow-ups, and even generate the next meeting agenda. And this is just a dream because this drives me to my last tip. You turn these insights into actions after the meeting. A meeting without a follow-up is just a task. Share. The AI-generated summary with the team will help the team to understand, will highlight the action items, the deadlines, and who is responsible for what.
And even better for me is when you integrate these decisions with tools like Trello. Imagine you live in a meeting with an action that you didn't take note, but when you sit in your desk, you see that card there with the task you are assigned to coming from the meeting you had something like five minutes ago. This is gold. This is gold, for example, one final additional tip I want to give to you. It's I always when I do, of course, not all meetings, but the relevant ones I do, I Slack, I create a quick Slack survey with the team saying, did you like this meeting? What can we do to improve? And over time, you become a master in meetings, you become so productive that people really want to attend the meeting, because people truly believe that the meeting will help their projects move forward, and this is truly what matters. Okay? And remember, project meetings are part of what project management is. Don't think the project meetings are just a waste of time. And if you have this feeling that something is going wrong. Think about that. I hope you enjoy this episode and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
