by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

Meetings in general can be pushing you forward in your research. However, they might also consume large fractions of your time without giving you a lot of benefits. Today, we’ll be sharing some things on how to best structure, organize, and prepare your research meetings to get the most out of them.

Purpose: Our advice is to be aware of why you would be having a meeting. Do you need to discuss future directions, do you want feedback on your work, do you want to catch up with your collaborators? All these are definitely valid purposes to schedule a meeting. Are you scheduling the meeting just because you haven’t met for a while? Or is it a re-occuring meeting blocking some spot in your calendar and you think you should just attend. In this case, it might be worth canceling the meeting.

Preparation: If the meeting has a valid purpose, preparation is key to making it successful. Depending on your meeting’s purpose, here are some ideas on how to best prepare.

  1. If you want to discuss future directions on something that you have been working on, prepare a summary of what you have done in the past, why you have done it, and what was your intended outcome. Also, it might be helpful to include a short summary of the overarching goal, just to remind the person who is supposed to give you feedback. We usually recommend our students to put this information into a short written report and share it with us 1-2 days before the meeting, such that we can already think about it before and give better direction. Additionally, it is always helpful if you have some slides for the meeting, just as a visual aid to brainstorm together.
  2. If you want feedback on your work, the same strategy will be useful: prepare a written short report, and have slides ready. Also, think clearly about what parts of the work you would like to get feedback on. Formulate this as questions, and stay as concrete as you can. Thereby, you will get the most out of it. These questions also guide your advisor on what aspects to focus on, and helps both of you to use your time efficiently.
  3. If you want to catch up with collaborators, recall what they were supposed to be working on. Were there some concrete topics there wanted to cover, or some experiments to run? If necessary, check meeting notes from the last meeting to remember. Then, reach out to them and, for example, ask them to prepare 1-2 slides in a shared presentation about their topic. It is also always helpful if you have concrete questions about their outcome. This helps making the exchange efficient and shows that you also care about what they are working on. If multiple people are involved, it often also makes sense to make an agenda (with time allocation), and to send this around before the meeting, just such that everyone is on the same page. You should also always ask your collaborators if they have topics they want to include in the schedule.

In the meeting: The best meetings are the ones that are on point. If you are well prepared, then you are halfway there. During the meeting, the most important thing then will be to reach the desired outcome. In the process, we recommend you keep track of time. If you have a written agenda, this might be relatively easy, if you only have your prepared slides and questions, it might be more tricky. But you can still navigate the timing according to your priorities, and depending on how many points you would like to discuss. Also, don’t hesitate to take lead in the meeting and try to prevent loosing time. If you notice that a conversation does not lead anywhere, or if other participants are not as well prepared as you are and slow down the pace by re-iterating things that you all had already agreed on in the last weeks, don’t be shy to intervene. You can do so very gently, by, for example, pointing to the agenda, saying that there are still a few open points, and that the current ongoing discussion could be moved offline for after the meeting, or should be conducted between the parties involved within a different scope than the meeting. Additionally, we recommend you to take notes during the meeting to keep track on everything that was discussed and to document important decisions and next to-do items.

After the meeting: We recommend to take some time after the meeting to first of all reflect on the things that have been discussed. Ask yourself if the purpose of the meeting was met. If not, you might have to re-iterate and ask for more feedback offline, and formulate the parts that you need more feedback on. Then, structure your meeting notes to make them useful for the future. Always ask yourself, if your future you, two months from now, would still be able to make sense of them? If not, try to improve them and write them down where you can revisit them in the future. Finally, if other people are involved, it might make sense to share your notes with them. Make sure that the to-dos you discussed are assigned and the everyone involved knows what is expected from them until the next meeting.

Running efficient meetings takes practice, but if you follow the steps above, you will become more efficient and have better outcomes.