Meeting Prep, on Your Own Time: A Template Google Doc

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After feeling frustrated that I wasn’t prepped as much as I wanted before a meeting called by one of my co-workers at Plexus Engine, I came up with the following Google Doc template to capture all the info we needed before meeting with someone from outside our company. I really like this system and thought I’d share it.

The procedure we’re experimenting with is to create a copy of this Google Doc, edit it to fill it out, then paste the URL to view it inside our company calendar listing for said meeting. I’ve been experimenting with changes; just tonight I added the field for “confirmed within 36 prior hours” because I try to email people the day before a meeting to confirm and set the stage.

This system helps us communicate explicitly about meetings, but on our own time. It doesn’t take too much time to fill one of these out – generally less than 5 minutes. We’ll see how it works, we’ve only just begun doing it. If you’d like a copy of that same template, I posted one here. I have a link to that master template doc bookmarked in my browser toolbar. If you can think of any other ways this could be made more useful, please let me know.

  • Ideally you should be having a template preset for each meeting on fixed days in daily / weekly / monthly etc cycles as required. If you are having too many random meetings which requires this google sheet to be filled up each time – it doesn’t seem logical – regards @bhaveshshah

  • We have a saying here “He who owns the meeting request owns the agenda. He who owns the agenda owns the recap.” It helps. It seems arduous, but it helps.

  • Thanks for the feedback Bhavesh, maybe it won’t continue to be this way once we’re out of startup mode (when will that be?) but for now we have mentors and allies and prospects to meet with all the time.

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