Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's topic, big to small meeting agendas. Here we go. Well Mark I think a lot of folks struggle with how to structure their meeting agendas, and particularly what should come first. I mean, how do you define the time among the four or five or six items that you want to discuss or decide or action.

And folks make it a lot harder than it needs to be.

It's really not that hard.

Now it's not.

You put the most important item first, you give it plenty of time. I've recently

been in some meetings, I thought everybody knew this, but it seems like they do it backwards

where they put the most important item last, thinking that everybody needs to warm up in the

meeting or the fact that it's last and it comes

right before the end of the meeting they'll make a decision quickly before the meeting

ends and that just doesn't work.

So three simple rules.

This is standard meeting protocol. We should have done this years ago, I apologize.

When you're creating an agenda, you put the most important item first, okay?

Then you put other items in order of decreasing importance and you give less

time to things that are less important.

And in the beginning, guys, just before we get into the details, the beginning of doing this you're not going

to always know how much time things need but you probably know how important things

are and so you set time by how important things are and you learn who on your team takes

more time to brief and those kind of things and you make those kind of

subtle adjustments but if you'll focus on the importance of an item it's value to

the organization and and sometimes it's urgency but hopefully not always and give it

plenty of time you'll do a lot better.

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