Although essential — and an asset to your agency — meetings can be a drag. Most attendees think they’re a boring and unproductive waste of time. Some, rather than focus on the content of the meeting itself, make to-do lists of all the things they could be doing instead. That makes meetings not just a waste of that person’s time, but everyone else’s as well. However, this tendency toward boredom can be easily corrected by identifying and resolving a few common meeting mistakes. Meetings seem straightforward: Meet with clients or team members, make decisions, tackle your after-meeting tasks. But that’s rarely how agency meetings work. Here are eight ways your team may be making meetings more difficult: Meetings are lacking a purpose or agenda. What’s the point of the meeting? If you can’t answer that, attendees are going to perceive it as unnecessary. When that happens, you’ll face a frustrated and tuned-out audience. To ensure your meeting is effective and efficient, you first need to determine its purpose. Create a detailed agenda that gives the meeting structure. At a minimum, the agenda should cover the topics that will be discussed and for how long. This lets everyone know what to expect and how to prepare, and it keeps the meeting within the allotted time frame. The meeting is too bloated. When you schedule a meeting, don’t invite everyone within your agency. That doesn’t mean people should be left out in the cold. But too many cooks in the kitchen can cause confusion, and it’s wasting people’s time if they’re not true stakeholders. Only invite key decision makers. You can let everyone else know what was accomplished in a follow-up email. This way, you aren’t pulling [...]