Mastering Meetings - Episode #141 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:11 Jason Atwood: This is the 141st episode of CloudFocus Weekly. For the last week of June 2013, this episode is titled Master the Meeting. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus. your copy of the experts. I'm your host Jason Atwood and joining me or should I say meeting with me for the hundred and forty first time co-host Justin Helstein Justin Haydn.

Justin Edelstein: I like your voice inflections you go way up and then you come down then you go way up and then you come down. This is the hundred and forty first episode.

Jason Atwood: Covers weekly it's my professional broadcasting for oh wait no i actually was a business maker must be your voice addiction class i was i didn't go to college and weren't going to college what and to learn to speak on a on a microphone microphone no i i did not So we have a very special episode of CloudFocus Weekly today.

Justin Edelstein: Sound effects when you say that. Like, like music under it.

Jason Atwood: Very special episode of CloudFocus Weekly. So this will be our third very, special episode. We did our one on support. Correct. We did our one on GTD, which is still hot in the streets. Very, very popular. We did our one on support. which we have to recap that at some point. We have to like do a something like a getting a weekly review.-what week review? What? The review one? Good. of you. I would love that. Deep.

Justin Edelstein: I want to listen to that one. Justin wants to listen to me talk about it. I don't even want to do it. I just want to listen to that one.

Jason Atwood: I get David Allen to call him. You can talk to me whenever you want. But this one came about, we're doing meetings. So we're gonna talk about meetings. We're gonna meet.

Justin Edelstein: Talk about a meeting. Yes, please. Talk about a meeting. Please don't turn it off right now. They're like, no, I go to meetings all the time. Please, good. I know how they work. Right. So this actually came about when I proposed proposed this, weeks or maybe even months ago.

Jason Atwood: I was listening to another podcast, a big fan of Back to work with Merlin Mann.

Justin Edelstein: And he- Were you listening to the first half hour or the second half hour? No, second hour. First half hour is nothing. Oh my gosh.

Jason Atwood: Anyway, and he did a little riff on meetings and then I thought, and then he posted a, he posted an old video of him talking to, he was actually at Twitter, talking to them at, you know, meetings.

Justin Edelstein: There's nothing better than a Merlin riff.

Jason Atwood: There's nothing better than a Merlin. I actually, no, they think it's better than a Merlin riff is a the Merlin well thought out presentation. That's true too. Because he's good, but like the riffing gets too riffing and I like it when he just digs into something. So I figured, you know, we actually, A, we do a lot of meetings. B, we came from an organization that was, had I think some of the biggest problems that I've ever met in meetings. And now we've created an organization that we kind of have taken a lot of lessons that we've learned from that other organization that should not be named. You and other organizations we worked at and sort of made them better. And I feel like I feel like we've actually done a lot and a lot with making the process of meetings.

03:22 Jason Atwood: And then to cap it, this week I said I'm going to write a blog post for next week. And I kind of went through and I put my thoughts together on the stuff that I think make meetings really good and the stuff that make meetings really bad and what to avoid. So I thought we kind of deep dive, dig in and get meetingful. Oh, so bad.

Justin Edelstein: So bad. So I'm not even even so bad. It's good. It's just bad.

Jason Atwood: So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna talk a lot about it. But top level items. We're gonna talk about problems. We're gonna talk about who to invite. We're Rana talk about where to schedule. We're gonna talk about how to manage them best practices, tips and tricks like we're gonna go deep. But I want to start with you. Me. you Currently give me not this not the solutions. We're gonna talk about solutions at the end You have to listen the whole thing

Justin Edelstein: Like what do you think the biggest problems are with meetings today? Sure? so in my opinion there's you know, they're the biggest problems come when People aren't sure of why they're even meeting so Meetings just have a meeting with no agenda. No clear owner or leader of the meeting been in quite a few meetings where you know you're just invited and it's like you're just there and it's like you want to raise your hand and say kind of excuse me why am I here. So that's a result of problems in you know scheduling some of the problems in who to have at the meeting some of the how to start a meeting off and kick off a meeting properly you know a lot of issues with people that just Don't really know what to do with the time so they just Throw out like a meeting request.

Justin Edelstein: I also have a problem with people who just throw out meeting requests requests and don't ask me if I'm actually available and don't make me like required or optional or anything of that nature. Just say invite. Don't check to see if I'm available. If you're in my organization, you can see my free busy. You can see if I'm available. So those are some of my bugaboos.

Jason Atwood: So I mean, I'm going to go a little bit big picture, bigger, higher up. I think meetings are sort of the next wave of insidious cancer to our. heard. to our corporations and to our organizations and to the work day life. Email was the first in cities cancer, right? And I think we've sort of learned through tools and whatever. And like we talk about email, and maybe I can send you a hundred emails and you can't stop me. So it's kind of out of your control. Like mail even, you can either go to the mailbox or not go to the mailbox. With email it's kind of like you don't have a choice. You're inundated. And so meetings have become that. People can throw things, basically throw things on your calendar. They can take your time without paying for it, without asking for it, without...

06:44 Jason Atwood: Having any you know value of what you're doing in your life they can take your time and they can fill it up and in Oregon in a in a world where you know, we're all concerned about productivity and all that They can take as much as they want and they even you're saying oh, they don't look to see if I'm busy or not Even looking at someone's calendar and seeing their booked for eight hours of the day and then putting it on the ninth hour

Justin Edelstein: Even that I knew lots of people at the old organization back in the day Where that was their goal the goal

Jason Atwood: Was to fill the day with meetings but that was work and I want to I mean I want to say that that's sort of where I come to this is that my You know, where I came to everything is that a meeting is not work. It is not the actual doing of anything. And so if you start with that and say, you know what? Unless your job is to do nothing but do meetings, which I, I don't think a lot of the people who listen to this podcast or like their job isn't to sit and just be in meetings, there are people out there, right? I think government officials. like these high executives where they're actually not doing anything. They don't open Excel other than to look at something. They don't configure anything. They don't do, it's really just a matter of listening to people and then saying, and then delegating.

Jason Atwood: If your job is a 99% delegation job, yeah, you probably meetings is what you do. You go to meetings, you listen to people, you make decisions, and you tell people all the people do it. But there's very few of those people and the rest of the people have to do the work. and so organizations get... slow down to these crawls because people use meetings as a way of forwarding work or as a crutch to forward work and to make things happen in the organization. And so I think that's my biggest thing is that they, you know, it's sort of, I, and I've been, this is the PN blog post next week, but like, I want meetings to be the last resort. is the last resort for when nothing else can work. I always look for, okay, if I need a meeting, do I need a meeting, first of all?

Jason Atwood: And then is there anything else I can do in the world besides this meeting? Like, can I have a quick call? Can I go talk to somebody? Can I write up a document? Can I send them an email? Can I text them? I mean, what other five ways could I get this information or whatever I need? You know without having a formal sit-down meeting one of the other big problems We're hitting on problems.

Justin Edelstein: No, let's get all the bar good things with meetings too, you know but one of the other problems is when people will stop working because they need to meet before they can continue working so like Oh, I did this thing. Now we have to have a meeting to all get together and talk about it. And that meeting is not scheduled for another week and a half. So the whole momentum just stops. Because you didn't have a meeting to talk about it. I mean, there are a lot of tools out there now that allow for people to collaborate in ways that did not exist. Five, 10 years ago, you don't need to necessarily meet, to. Put a PowerPoint presentation on my screen Everyone can look at it at the same time, you know Online or or whatever in advance and be sent out in email or be shared via Google presentation or on the chatter feed or whatever it is, you can get those things out.

10:19 Justin Edelstein: People without having to present it in person.

Jason Atwood: Right, and I think that's something I also want to dig into a little. The problem with meetings too has become, or one of the sort of things is that 50 years ago, 30 years ago, your ability to collaborate in a non-person-to-person environment was almost nil. Like you had a phone, you didn't have a fax, 30 years ago had a fax, maybe 40 years ago didn't have a fax. You basically get a phone and you had a meeting.

Justin Edelstein: And that was it. I think back to when I was growing up, my father worked at a large institution. The same one that we always talk about. The same one, actually. Large institution. We all know how you got your job. And that's not true. Come on. You hired me. It's your fault. But I remember him traveling all over the world. He went to Chile a few times, Chile. He's been to Hong Kong, he's been to Paris, London, just every continent almost, for business. And I think to myself now, I'm like, wow. I meet with people from, you know, this morning I had a meeting with one of our clients, a global company, and I met with... Who shall not be named? Well, they can be named, but I'm not gonna name them. you know, one person was in Pennsylvania, one person was in a suburb of London, and two people were in Pune in India.

Justin Edelstein: So there's five people at a meeting, no one's in the same place. Right. And they're all over the globe. And I think back like 30 years ago, and I'm like, that couldn't happen. Right.

Jason Atwood: And I think that's even work. And we've done this shift now from having where meetings like, again, if you were going to meet at that time, that wouldn't take in that would have taken

Justin Edelstein: Weeks to coordinate and you would, you wouldn't just go to. Pune or fly someone to to New York or Philly you would have to do a whole big agenda around it Right and and how and be there for like a week or four days and make a whole thing out of it instead of a quick half Hour, we need to catch up. So let's catch up So and that's both the good and the bad the good moves

Jason Atwood: Is that that meeting like when you wrote a letter So I'll make the email analogy again when you used to write a letter, it was hard and difficult and took a lot of time to write a letter. And then it cost money. When something becomes free and easy, then people sort of abuse it. So whereas, you know, to schedule a meeting a long time ago would take all that effort and cost thousands of dollars to get those same people in the room. Now it's literally free. I mean, as free as you know, freezer going to get meaning you have a subscription of this and Vype and all that people work from home. We'll talk about tools later. Yeah so I think that's one of the big issues is that meetings have have been become very easy to do and easy to get on people's calendar again be 30 years ago, you couldn't get on someone else's calendar without calling somebody else and then having them put them Put you on your counter now you can send an email to somebody and it literally will block out their time I could literally just box out their time Sometimes you have to accept it or not, but it still shows up up, like it still sit there on the calendar.

13:41 Jason Atwood: And if you're in an Outlook environment, you know, internally, which I think is part of the problem of meetings, it will be there and I think they don't auto accept, but it already looks like you're going to go.

Justin Edelstein: It tentatively puts you in that light blue. Right. Or whatever the color is. Like there's a meeting request outstanding at this time. Right.

Jason Atwood: So here's so so having said that am I first then taking from the point of You should do everything you can to avoid a meeting because I feel that there There's a great reason to have them But you should go through every other scenario of making sure that this is the right reason to have it What are the right reasons to have it? Well collaboration in a place that needs to be real time with everybody from local places from different places, right That's a good meaning. To get communication that would take too long or to train. I mean, training is a good example of a meeting like... Okay, you know to train somebody you should do that by a meeting, you know telling someone to go read 20 Documents is not as good as getting on a call and having someone show you something So there's all these good reasons to have them, but I would say My first thing of is just make sure that you've gone down the path of is there really a need for this Right and on that is a really need for this and then the second question is Who should you invite?

Jason Atwood: So let's talk about who you should be meeting. Like what's why and who and we talk a little bit about how.

Justin Edelstein: I mean in our context we generally deal with who are doing projects. That's what most of our meetings are. We are not a very heavy internal meeting company.

Jason Atwood: Arkus and we have and we have absolutely

Justin Edelstein: Zero standing meetings no standing meetings internally no internal standing meetings, right? I mean we have things that we do once a month or once every other month or once every quarter or whatever But they're not on the calendar. They're sort of like, okay, we kind of need to do this. Let's Let's schedule it.

Jason Atwood: And I think that's one of my first sort of the tips of a thing is while you can meet weekly or monthly or yearly or whatever, there can be a periodisisty. Let's cut that out in post. I still don't think you got it. Try again. Of your meetings, not even going to try. Periodicity? Is that the word? Maybe. I don't think so. It's a good one if it is. Maybe I just made it up. Possible. possible. You don't have to necessarily make, click the repeat button. Like we can have, you can have a monthly meeting that you're supposed to meet in the first week of every month without throwing it out there under the calendar. Because what I find is if you do that, then it allows for no flexibility. It also allows for... You know sort of go.

16:48 Jason Atwood: Oh, so it's like this podcast. So it's a good great example Yeah, we do it every week, but it's not a recurring meeting Not a great meeting of our calendars what we do is we rely on our other tools to make sure that we put it on our calendar weekly and I go in and every week I schedule it because Every week it could be different. And so like for a monthly meeting same thing, you know, I want to make sure that A, do you need to have it? It could be a monthly meeting, but you just met two days ago. Or you could have been monthly, you just had a great jam session. So you're like, well, we don't need it this month. So it's on the calendar, why do we need to have it?

Jason Atwood: So I think it's one of the things that's sort of, I wrote this, this in the blog post next week, which is really try as hard as you can not to avoid standing meetings. But, so okay, keep going on to who you should play. So, so.

Justin Edelstein: I mean, when we kick again, we're very proud to projects, right? So when we're meeting with a client, you know, in the kickoff meeting, I always identify kind of like that single point of contact that project manager on the other side, it might be one person might be two people. So Typically coordinate with that person to say you're invited always you can come if you need to be there. I'd like you to be there. But I'm going to rely on you to help me understand who from your and needs to be invited so for talking about rolling out sales force and we're going to do it for a sales team in a so I don't really need. the service people at the meeting where I'm going to be talking about leads and converting them to opportunities.

Justin Edelstein: On the flip side, I don't necessarily need the sales people there when I'm talking about case escalation rules. Now at the end of the day at the training, there might be some cross contamination where hey salespeople you can see the services that are being provided to You're. to your people that you're selling to and vice versa service you can see maybe the accounts and what they mean. So, you know, make sure that the right people are at the meetings. If you're at like a crossroads, make sure a decision maker is at the meeting. Like if you're at like a trouble spot or you need a decision made, make sure that if you're gonna schedule a meeting to get a decision made, You know, if by all other means necessary, you have to get on the phone and you have to meet, or you have to go to someone's office and meet in person, make sure the person who can make the decision is there so that they can get the information firsthand.

Justin Edelstein: I find that that's most effective as opposed to, you know, if they're not going to be there, then you can just send them an email. And I think that's the information right and definitely less is more right the bigger the meeting

Jason Atwood: And this other sort of a theme here When the more people you have on the meeting My feeling is the more you need to prepare for the meeting meaning the more you need to Detail things right So I have a couple examples that, you know, and later and what sort of best practices are on meetings, but so West is more, right? Making sure, because even when we do training, one of the things we try to do is we on a go-to WebEx conference call type training, we try to limit the number through experience to roughly around 10 people. Right? Getting on with 30 to 50 to people, and we've been on calls recently with big... It just gets hard to handle. The technology actually isn't very good at handling massive amounts of people on a conference call, on a WebEx, on a GoTo unless it's one broadcasting to everybody, but now with interactivity.

20:26 Jason Atwood: I mean, you know, those chat windows turn into scrolling, whatever, and... the people it just it's too much. So there's a point of sort of saying, I get it you want it you have to have a sort of a conference with 100 people that's different but really the less people that are needed and the more focus they are in on what their roles and responsibilities at the meeting, the better. So really consider, I know it's easy to put people in a byline like like CCing somebody on an email, but you're literally taking an hour worth of their time. And so make sure that there's a value for them to be there, not just like, oh, because I'm CCing them. I would say, if you can say to yourself, this person could get a recap of the meeting after the meeting, which we'll talk about later, and be totally happy.

Jason Atwood: Then don't invite them and give them a recap afterwards. Right? How'd that meeting go? I didn't need to be there. Great. I got, I get the five minute recap, saved me some time. so you actually brought up the next point which I had in here which was where to schedule from. So it's a great, it's a great tip for you, everybody out there. If you're trying to schedule multiple organizations. Pick a person in the other organization as your point. You don't need to put together the best meeting request ever with everybody from 17 planets on it. Because realistically, people pay more attention to internal meeting requests than they do external meeting requests. And internal people can look at their availability-wise, external cannot. So I have found, and now do, If I need to schedule within an organization, I'll use one person as my point.

Jason Atwood: I'll say, I'll throw the thing on your calendar, right, from me. So it's on ours. We're mutually locked. But then you schedule internally. So I might get on the phone and say, hey, look at your time. When's a good time? They'll say, oh, I got everybody's here here. Oh, I can see everybody's good at two next week. Great. I'm good at two. I'll send you. You send that out. I'll send one to you. So it does create a little bit of double.

Justin Edelstein: I do the same thing, right? They oftentimes tend to include me on theirs. So then I have it on my calendar twice, but that's okay. That's fine.

Jason Atwood: Well, that's also them just including you. So go to the place where the most people are or, and I've been in triple situations, where I'll just pick one person on this side and one person that's putting you internally, you and me internally me. We've tried unsuccessfully.

Justin Edelstein: I haven't tried very often. in. recently to use that cloud scheduler tool that salesforce provides. That's right. People just don't get it. I wish they did. I wish they did get it because it's pretty, pretty useful. You know, you can send out here's five times that work for me to a bunch of other people.

Jason Atwood: Pick a time and people just don't understand. They think they're actually requesting. They think they're going to the meeting at that point. Yeah, they don't get it Yeah, and it's actually really good. Also the tools inside I think to tell you that everybody did or did not do something I feel like they're not very good.

Justin Edelstein: They rolled that out and then kind of stopped I think it's because they probably saw nobody was using it, but that's quite a catch-22, isn't it? Yeah, it is a little bit. Nobody's using it.

23:27 Jason Atwood: It's not very good. It's not very good. So nobody's using it It's a great concept and every time I try to arrange with a bunch of people, I try to get to, you know, I always think, oh, I wish I had a tool and I know there's tools on the web where you know, meet now and go to, you know, meet some, there's tons of little websites,

Justin Edelstein: You know, at the end of the day. I used to have this one tool, I can't remember. My previous workplace which was not the large one where I could just install stuff on my machine It was this I forgot the news like I Forgot the name of it darn it. It was a tool that integrated with a your Outlook that sort of published your Availability out to the web. Yep, and then someone could from there You basically just sent him a little short link like a bitly style link and they would, click it and then they can request a meeting with you. So it's like, here, here's my cal... here's the link. Just pick a time and it will then show up on my calendar.

Jason Atwood: But even then, like, I think the complexities of the calendar, as if you're, you know, if you believe that your calendar is your hard landscape, meaning that everything that's on it is a real thing and it's not, you know, shoulda, coulda, woulda's, it's real. You just seeing that I'm booked for two to three gives you no insight into what's actually happening. I might be at my daughter's recital in Long Island City and you're booking me to be here in New York. So like, yeah, but that's a, that's a You see

Justin Edelstein: I don't know if we're talking about such we are. All right. Well, we'll get to calendars in a minute But I've learned to wrap certain meetings with Travel time big just a big block around it. So like a half hour before half hour after it's actually I don't put two separate things. I put one big one that just goes through the whole thing. Like if I have a meeting from one to two that requires me to travel a half hour on each end. You'll put another meeting. I'll put one meeting from 1230 to 230. Right. That just says travel.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I'll do. If I know that that's a the problem and I think the people are I feel like it's still, I can still see my availability, you still can't tell the context of those meetings or where I'm going to be at those times. And so I think, you know, again, doing over email saying, listen, what are some times and here's a tip I everybody knows this, but I'm gonna throw it out there. You don? t start off with what are your times you start if you're starting the conversation, start with your times. Because then it cuts one email down, right? You say, I'm available at... all Monday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon. You give them you give them the swaths and then that'll cut down because then they'll say I can do three. It's also a good sales tip for those sales people out there that are listening.

26:29 Justin Edelstein: That's a much if your goal is to secure a meeting, you say I'm gonna be available. this time on this date, can you meet then? As opposed to saying when would you like to meet? Because then it's like never. You're not really asking. Yeah, never, no.

Jason Atwood: I know I always give two swaths so I'll either three options one to TFI if it's if it's literally you know if I have only our chunks I'll give the three hours a nice chunky time because I'm trying to get them to figure out when they so I'll give them two to five on Tuesday I'm open or all Tuesday afternoon or whatever. So that's a I see your list here.

Justin Edelstein: You know, as you're scheduling, once you do schedule and you send out your meeting invite, so what to put in your account. From your calendar of choice, here at Arkus, I think we're one of 10 people who send out invites from the actual Salesforce.com calendar. Crazy like the crazy like that, syncing with the Google calendar. so you could send her out from the Google Calendar if you'd like. But it's a good practice to put the agenda of the meeting in the meeting invite.

Jason Atwood: Yeah I'm just gonna say that again so everybody understands. Well first of all title. Subject of it should be meaningful. And we, if we're scheduling it, we put the subject of our client in it. And I've always struggled like should I put me? But if I look at my calendar it's Arkus Arkus Arkus Arkus. It doesn't make any sense. So if I'm putting in If I'm scheduling it, I'm putting your company name in there. So shows up on your calendar with your company name. I still haven't found a perfect thing for that because I could put both, but that seems kind of strange, you know, and then I generally put what it is. Is it training? Is it checking? Is it product status? I'll put it in the subject line. And then the first thing, and everybody should do this, every meeting, no meeting request should come out and actually wrote about this in depth in the blog post.

Jason Atwood: Every meeting should have an agenda and you're gonna say, what? Like why should I have an agenda if I'm just having a one-on-one? Here's what, and I thought about this as writing it, your agenda should be as big and should follow suit to how many people are in the meeting. If you and I are meeting, a one-liner. We're meeting to talk about blah, fine. Two people, maybe I throw two, two, you know, I, I, it's a one-liner. Five people? I'm gonna write out a couple little things, right? We're gonna put a couple little bullet points. We're gonna talk about this, this, and this. 20 people? Now I'm talking, I think you're in the, this should have a formal agenda, right? It should really outline. So just think about it, the more people, the more chances that they're being misunderstanding of what they're there for.

Jason Atwood: Also the type of meeting.

Justin Edelstein: It might be a one person meeting, but it could be a training session. So if it's a training session, you know, your agenda might be training. But there's likely an accompanying document that goes... Along with it. Here's the training agenda, right? So the agenda for the meeting is training the training itself has an agenda so making sure that people when you're scheduling meetings if there is Supporting documentation or supporting materials. It doesn't have to be documentation. Just anything that people should Have access to during the meeting or should have reviewed prior to the meeting, make sure that you've given them ample time to do such things. Right.

30:09 Jason Atwood: I would say there's almost no scenario where I want to get that document in the meeting. I almost always want to get it before.

Justin Edelstein: Because you know, you'd be like, oh, on page six of the document, you're like, hmm, meeting just started. I'm still on page one. And just started reading it. And you're sending out my attention's on this. document and not what you're talking about and if the whole purpose was to just read this document I could have read it. Right. You go to send me, I'll read it and send my notes back.

Jason Atwood: I would say also again that same thing. If it's a big document, give them more time. If it's a small document, give them it then it can be reviewed quickly. Ask yourself is do I need a meeting to do this? Can I just send them a document, say let's call if you have any questions. But especially with things that need to be reviewed, you know, mention that they need to be reviewed, say, we are going to go over this, please review the document, like make it very clear what you're asking of the people. Because again, you're, you know, in sending a meeting request, you're really just, you're taking something from them. So, you know, they might want the meeting or not want the meeting, but you should always be considering that. I'm taking your time.

Jason Atwood: I want to take the least amount of time and I want to make your time the most productive it possibly can be for that time that I'm taking. So give them all the things you can. So you know, a good subject line, a great agenda. And again, my basics is basically three bullet points. And I put in three bullet points to say here's what we're going to be talking about because most times people know what we're kind of going to be talking about, but this just gives us a little thing to sort of go back to and we'll talk about that in running the meeting, but go back to it, say, hey, this is what we're trying to get out of this meeting. And then always, always, always include the information seems obvious. But like include the information of how to get.

Jason Atwood: It is all in the same place so I can get to it. and we've kind of been talking about this but it we've we've done it as a like it

Justin Edelstein: Goes without saying but it should not go without saying that every meeting should have a meeting request oh it happens where sometimes you're emailing back and forth and it's like yeah 1130 works for me okay right and then it's like someone's got to send out the meeting request so it's if it's you started that conversation and said we should meet does 1130 work for you and they say yes send out a meeting invite right if it if you're on the other end of it and someone asks you hey we need to get together Can you get together at 1130? Say, yeah, sure, can you send out the meeting invite? Or, sure, I will send out the meeting invite. Someone needs to send it out though because you can't rely on people to just then put it on their own calendar and know- what the dial-in is or am I calling you or are you calling me, I mean that's one of my least favorite things when- when someone is like where can I reach my phone number?

33:18 Justin Edelstein: It's in my email signature. That's where you can reach me. You can also reach me via email. You can reach me any number of ways. OK, do three thirty. Fine. What do you what do you are you going to like send out? Like I'll accept it. What do you want to do? I find that I normally.

Jason Atwood: I end every time so when I'm scheduling with somebody I say I will shoot them the times and then I'll ask the question I'll say do these times work for you? Let me know and I will send out the invite so I let them know that all they need I'm trying to make it easy for them what you're trying to make easy for clients mostly I say I'm trying to make it the easiest. I'm giving you times and I'm telling you if you say yes 2 p.m. That means I'm the next thing you should see for me is a meeting invite. And if I don't know you, meaning I don't know your systems and I've never had a meeting with you, I will then follow up on that email and say, invite on its way or invite sent.

Jason Atwood: Because it happens that invites get swept into something you don't get them whatever. So you should be letting the person know even the invite is coming right. Maybe it's 10 meetings with you, is that fine? But I know that they don't get caught in spam, but if I don't, first couple times I might say, hey, did you get it? Or I sent it, and then I've had clients come back and say, oh, I didn't get it. And I'll be like, okay, do you check this or check that We talked about what we're putting in there, putting in the dial-in information, putting in the location, putting in what you're supposed to be doing. So if it's a conference call, if it's a this, if it's an in-person meeting, put the address in there. I know it is crazy, but put everybody's supposed to be going.

Jason Atwood: There's meetings we've had in the past and it's like, oh, it's someone's offices, but the addresses aren't attached. I know in other systems there, but put it there because that's what I'm staring at on my phone and I want to be able to click it and open up a map so I can go figure out where it is and how to get to it. So that's all sort of the pre stuff. I would say accepting meetings. You know, again, some places just sort of throw on there. It would be really helpful if everybody just accepted the meeting There's no tentative in sales.

Justin Edelstein: There's no tentative accepting and there's no optional. Right.

36:22 Jason Atwood: Salesforce meeting requests are very nothing. All or nothing. Because out of the time. Forever. Forever. Maybe we'll have to talk about that at some future meeting.

Justin Edelstein: I need to be. Put that on some agenda. You know where I stand. Yeah. No we can't talk about.

Jason Atwood: ............. I.............. Talk about why, to meet, or not.

Justin Edelstein: To meet or not to meet. So let's, let's talk about some best practices.

Jason Atwood: If you do a lot of meetings, get an expand. if and. If you do a lot of meetings, get an expand. If you do a lot of meetings, I have about four that I use. Inside of meeting. go to meeting and my go to meeting in the island. the that the meeting invite.

Justin Edelstein: The thing that tells people to click on accept You mean like tells them how to get a meeting because you're sending it from sales That's correct You're one of four people and

Jason Atwood: I train everybody and then I have another one that does oh that does the agenda will do a little In a meeting request instead of writing that out of the database I literally can maybe with four keystrokes and it fills up the whole thing for me. I have the same thing I

Justin Edelstein: Also have the the Like taking ability same thing with the text expander We just jumped right to a tip and tricks.

Jason Atwood: The tips tips of sending meeting requests and stuff like that. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: I'm not to give away any secret sauce or anything, but here's when we hold meetings Every meeting that we have, believe it or not, is documented in a Google Doc.

Jason Atwood: Well, I'd say you skipped one for me, which would be every meeting should have a meeting leader, there is someone who's responsibility that is. Oh, well, I didn't know we're like going in some sort of sequential order. Yeah, the sequential order. We went from who to invite, we went to what to put in the meeting request, and now we're going into what to do in the meeting. I'm sorry, I skipped. Well, I think we said that when you're running a meeting

39:52 Justin Edelstein: Back to back like if you have a meeting from 3 to 3 30 and then another one from 3 30 to 4 Use a different dial-in maybe When you're at the end of one at the end and you're trying to hustle to like get through you're like Oh, I got another meeting coming in one minute Hey, this is Bob Finishing up here I thought we were going to talk about whatever. Hold on one second. So you're going to get me the... Oh, that's no good. So there's a tip for you. Use a different dial in or a different whatever. Go to a lousy to schedule a bunch of recurring meetings. But they don't go over each other. Meaning? No, they don't. Because if you'd like, you just use the phone number. Right. So you can schedule a couple of recurring go to meetings.

Justin Edelstein: But they're separate dial-ups. They're separate dial-ups. Yeah, very good. I would also say,

Jason Atwood: The bigger the more important meeting, especially before meeting or after meeting, you should give yourself time on either end. I know it's not always possible and there's not, you know, to have But a good meeting has someone who, again, if you're the person who's You're ready to go and again as you're the person who's doing the meeting, every meeting should have someone, it's their meeting and it's their responsibility. They need to have everything up and running before the meeting starts, before anybody else gets there, they need to and I would say, I like and I think a good practice if you're the one reading it, you're- introing the people into the conversation as people beep beep your job is to Just join who they are I get on these calls where they don't know who's running the meeting and you hear boop loop And it's like hey, it's Bob or bloop bloop Sally's here, but you like Someone's your job your job is to coordinate and heard the cats so heard them say okay.

Jason Atwood: We're just waiting for whatever You know who should be on the call. This is part of being a meeting manager. You know who should be on the call and you know who's there because you're kind of going, okay, well, we're still waiting for blah or blah. Do we need to wait whatever you're coordinating? That's the first five minutes of meeting, but that sets a lot of the tone. Like if someone's good, they're running that meeting. They're... coordinating the people as they come in and they're giving them pointers and saying, okay, we're just holding on. We're waiting for this. This person is jumping in, whatever. And then you're also pinging. If you need to ping people to get them on, that's your job. Like you need to go get, oh, I didn't hear Bob's job. All right, well, I'm going to go get them.

Jason Atwood: So like, it's sort of like a, you know, you're kind of a herder at that point, but that's your job. That's if you're running the meeting, you should be hurting. and getting people ready, especially when everybody's in multiple different places. People walking into the conference room is one thing, but if it's like all over the place, just knowing who they are, where they're dialed in from, very important thing. Next up on mine is then I think the next thing you should do is then read through the agenda. I know it's crazy sauce, but...

43:10 Justin Edelstein: You have no idea again restate the purpose purpose of why you are actually Congregating right at that very moment. Why are we congregate? Why are we here?

Jason Atwood: Big question and it can be as simple as right, you know Introductions to say who's here again if it's obvious it's obvious everybody knows who okay. We all know who's here. Let's get going Or if it's not, they say, hey, I'd like to take a minute and just make sure everybody knows who's on the call. Say, why are we here? I want to watch a movie. Or I also might state like I had one today where I was on with a client and I needed to sort of retell a story of how we got here because they had new people involved, they didn't really know what was going on. Right. Tell the. Tell the tale. Here's how we got here.

Justin Edelstein: Here's where we've been. Here's where we're going.

Jason Atwood: And then you already brought it up. It is already the main thing. During the meeting, again, during the meeting you're doing stuff. PowerPoint presenting your, your talking, you're going to the agenda, you're running the time. And I would say that that theory also goes with the how many. People are there. The more people are in the meeting, the more you have to take care to make sure everybody's on the same page. Two people in a meeting. Hey, what are we here for four people? Here's where quickly going to do 10 people on the meeting. I'm going to get pretty explicit about what we're doing. 100 people? Let's lay it all out. Because again, you want to get everybody, in order to make decisions and get people organized, you want to get them on the same page.

Jason Atwood: You know, Justin already said, one of our things is everything's documented.

Justin Edelstein: Every project has a Google Doc. And at the top of that Google Doc is a nice table of contents. Every, I mean, again, we're not really giving away anything super secret here, but Google Docs is actually a really great place to capture notes in a meeting because if more than one of you are in the meeting, you can both be in the doc. You could be chatting and watching the notes being taken at that time. Again, using TextExpander is a really nice way to click a couple keys and boom, it shoots up a nice title for that meeting with the date and the time and a little section for you to fill out who's there. and then like section headers for the meeting agenda. Questions, notes, follow-ups and takeaways. Hit all the big sort of header topics there for what you should be using to prep for a meeting, right?

Justin Edelstein: Every meeting should have an agenda. Every meeting might have some questions that you're going to be asked. They may or may not, maybe not. But you know, questions that you have to ask and get answered. Notes pretty obvious. And then one of the big ones is if you know you have a meeting you should probably come away from that meeting with at least one thing you need to do, right? Just store if my blog post. Yeah, well, it's kind of ingrained in the heads, right? So if you're in a meeting, you know, maybe you're there as reference material. You yourself are reference material. So you're there for your brain. And you're there really because you know something that everybody else doesn't. So you need to be there just to answer a bunch of questions yourself.

46:48 Justin Edelstein: You're not really asking anything like a deposition. If that's how you want to think of it. Like an IRS. sure. but a lot of the time you're in a meeting and you're talking about things that need to get done. You know, you've done stuff. You're talking about things you've done. And then there's the next steps, the things you that need to be done. So at the end it's. Good to both have the meeting leader say, all right, here's the things that need to get done. X, Y, Z, K, J, L, whatever. Here's who's gonna do them. Here's when they're gonna be done by. Everyone agree?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, great. Let's get that stuff done, and then you can follow up on them. The best meetings I've ever been on. And this is again hard because in a world where there are not a lot of people, in a world, you know, in the best meetings, like one of the big ones that, you know, run by project management groups, there is literally a dedicated person, almost a typist in the corner taking notes on every single thing that's said. And you think about it really like the biggest, most important meetings, aka a court case, Every word that's being said is taken down. There's a reason for that. So again, the more the bigger the meeting, the more you're going to, the more dedicated. So like when we do bigger, more important meetings, we dedicate people to be the note takers.

Justin Edelstein: And their job is to take the notes. We don't like to do that very often, but if it's necessary, we do it. Right. If it, if, if there's, we feel there's

Jason Atwood: A good value, something's going to be lost. So as the meeting person, your job is sort of to be running the meeting and also be also taking out what people are saying.

Justin Edelstein: Typically that happens during like a discovery session or a, you know, detailed requirements type of meeting where there's a lot of, as the meeting leader, there's a lot of. thinking and reacting that you need to be doing and sort of leading people down a path. And while they're talking back at you, you don't really have, you want to be like really listening as opposed to listening and typing what they're saying, because it's very important what they're saying. You need to have that stuff captured, but it's also really important to comprehend and listen very carefully so that you can respond appropriately and move down the path. I don't care who you are but that that ability to

Jason Atwood: Both listen and take in and comprehend and then back out and type down exactly what they're saying I have not anybody who can do it very difficult so you you either can do it because you slow down you say wait I'm gonna take this down like well I'm on with one client I'm talking to somebody I'll be like, I actually do, I do it as a way of repeating back to them. I'll say Jason to do this. And then as I'm telling them that, cause I'm saying it as I type it. So then they know, and I go, Sally to do this. And I'm typing it in my notes. Like these are the things that I'm doing.

Justin Edelstein: I do the same thing.

Jason Atwood: I just start talking slowly, but what I'm. saying is what I'm typing right I'm trying to get it onto a piece of paper I'm trying to get it written down trying to make sure that is documented. And again this comes to I was that this is the third thing that's really about the size and people the meeting. The more people who are in the meeting the more you need to be documenting and the more important it is to capture what's going on the last is probably last. So you know big important meetings that are you know incredibly important. It's you better be really thinking about that and capturing and letting people and letting people you know look at their tasks and whatever and then I would say the follow-up right so every meeting should end with some sort of thing either said on the meeting like you're gonna do this you're gonna do this or in great examples and again not always needed but needed sometimes.

50:33 Jason Atwood: Here's the email to everybody who got off this call with what's supposed to be done. So Sally, you said you were going to do this, Bob, you said you were going to do this, and here's the timeline of what I was saying to do it. That's a way to really push forward stuff. And then you know, wow, we had a great meeting. We talked about a bunch of stuff, and we divvied up the stuff that we do after the meeting, which is actually where you work. Because no one does any work in meetings. You just discuss stuff. And then you come away from it. And if you think about that, and that helps. I'm sort of like, OK, so I'm only meeting to sort of go over stuff and decide next steps and next actions.

Jason Atwood: And now I'm doing that stuff afterwards. So we better be very clear where it's going. And if you know people are bad at it, you got to be good at it. If you know people are good at taking down their tasks and different clients, different people, I will. you know I trust some better to know what they're supposed to be doing and others I know that they don't really pay attention and write it down and so I'll do it for them. Really important stuff.

Justin Edelstein: What else? Well I think we're at the point where we can talk about either you have a stance on standing. Good one. Thank you. Standing versus ad hoc meetings. You know, I'm reading ahead in your blog post. I've already read your blog post that nobody else has read, which is nice.

Jason Atwood: And we have next week on blog.arkusinc.com. Exactly.

Justin Edelstein: You kind of make a very bold statement in saying that standing meeting meetings are generally a waste of time. You want me to defend? I you don't have to defend your own statement. I mean, well, maybe you do. I think I do. Well, I have standing meetings and I don't feel like they're a waste of time. Here's I'll say that you say that as a broad stroke. General statement when in actuality, it's not true as a broad stroke. statement. It's true in some cases and untrue in others because, you know, as, as, I'm sure a bunch of our listeners who are Salesforce folks, and if they're still listening at this point, our agile developers and follow a scrum methodology, they're doing a stand up every day. Right. And that's a standing meeting and they're doing it.

Jason Atwood: Well, it's a standing meeting for two reasons. In true Scrum, a standing meeting is both a meeting that happens every morning and also a meeting where everybody is standing up. It is actually meant to do both. And the reason it is a standing meeting and a standing meeting is actually to keep it short. Right. Right. And it is very purposeful. And it is actually the only meeting, roughly, of those developers day. That's their meeting of the day. They get up, they talk about, and this isn't true, Agile methodology. They get up, they talk about three things of yesterday, two things they do today, and their problems and any obstacles in their way. They bring it to the Scrum Master, Scrum Master, then takes it and does it, and then they go to work, and they spend the next eight and a half hours doing work.

53:34 Jason Atwood: So while you can say that's a good example of why you should have a standing meeting, yes. So if you're only going to have one meeting a day and it's 15 minutes, go ahead, have your one standing meeting. But that's not the reality. Here's my theory on standing meetings. And I've... And I'm going to give... And I will defend myself. And I know you do them, and that's fine. And I know you do them on projects, and that's fine. And some people have them as a way. But here's why I think that they're not as effective as we think they are. It is human nature for people to do things when they're due. Meaning, you do work when it's to be done. People generally don't do work in advance. You go to college, you're taught for your entire career before you get into the work world.

Jason Atwood: It's due on this day, and I think you were talking about this this morning. You do it the day before it's due, or the week before it's due, or whatever. it. people aren't very good naturally of being proactive and doing things in advance. So I think the problem with standing meetings are, is meetings create a sort of chunking up of something that doesn't need to flow at that chunk. In an example, and I've seen this many times, it's like, I want to have a standing meeting every week about this project. And I have watched many, many people then use that as the reason to not do something until the meeting. So they'll say, well I need to get some information before I can do the next step. I'll wait to the meeting. So now no matter what, whenever that next meeting is, that person is going to wait.

Jason Atwood: Put not do what they could do to further the project. They're going to wait until that time. Whereas it becomes a crutch where they could have answered the question. They could have gotten the document. They could have done whatever it is to move forward as opposed to having waiting to that meeting. So people naturally kind of go, oh, I'll wait till Tuesday and we'll talk about it on a Tuesday call. If it's important, it shouldn't wait till Tuesday. It should go ahead of Tuesday. And that's all well and good. Right. And I think that what you...

Justin Edelstein: Are leaving out when you're saying that standing meetings are a waste of time is the fact that I should say that but okay well I think you did I did not I can read it if you'd like I said generally generally a waste of time and only do the reverse which is to slow things down yep now that's only if you're only having standing meetings That's true. If you're having a standing meeting because you want to have a standing meeting as a level setter and as a once a week, let's get more than one party together to just level set and let everyone know where you're at. That's a good thing. That doesn't preclude you from having other meetings throughout the week if you need to have other meetings during the week. If we need to talk about something, let's talk about it.

Justin Edelstein: They can be ad hoc. They can be a phone call. Phone call is kind of in this, is kind of like a meeting, right? A 15 minute occasion. So are these. So are these standing meetings. I'm not going to argue with you about them. That's the problem.

56:46 Jason Atwood: That's I will talk to you on Thursday. So I wait to talk about it then. Do you wait for them?

Justin Edelstein: Do you wait for them? Knowing that I don't have any you don't have any standing meetings. No, you just won't accept them You'll be like no, I will not actually have one but I have and I watched it. Here's another example No, no answer the question. What do you have a standing meeting at all ever? No, so I do not try and schedule them with you and you say no Really?

Jason Atwood: I do. Okay. I get on calls and I tell people I think standing meetings and here's, I'm gonna leave you another example which I think you're gonna like and I actually made this in the blog post as well. Standing meetings are also scheduled at a certain interval, right? So let's meet weekly. Let's meet monthly. Let's meet yearly. Let's meet every day. I think the problem with that too is it doesn't naturally go with the urgency of what's going on. So when you do the standing meeting for the next six months and you put it in your calendar to meet every week, fine. At that point, maybe for the first two weeks, talking weekly was an important thing to do. But then as you get on in the project where maybe there's a big development cycle or maybe there's something else, the meetings don't need to take place.

Jason Atwood: They're not at the right schedule. They should be either faster or they should really slow down to be once every month or so. So I feel like standing meetings also create a level of friction and noise that slow down or artificially speed up or make connections to things that don't need to be done. Again, I think this day and age, I wish there was no ability to put a repeating project. on our repeating meeting request on someone's calendar because I feel like people, I feel like it gets abused and it creates a situation where people are waiting for or just kind of going through the motions of as opposed to all the stuff we said before. So here's my example as well. If we talked about having a great agenda and requiring the right people on the call for the right meeting, right?

Jason Atwood: If that's all so important. blown away in a standing meeting because a standing meeting has the same. Agenda that it's had for the last six months is the same people it's had for the last six months and really no one's reviewing or getting ready for that is the same one.

Justin Edelstein: It becomes no way had. I think you've just had some bad experiences with these because I've been in the business for so long. I've had great experiences with them. I've learned to not use them.

Jason Atwood: I've learned to be much more effective without them. I've learned to refute them because I see what or who should or not be there. It's a generic thing that just goes on forever. So that's why I don't like them. I'm not saying it's not, I'm not saying it's not, but I feel like they use standing meetings as an artificial way to pay attention. And if that's what you're doing, you're artificially getting people to pay attention at a certain time, then I ask,rapnel.,,.,,

1:00:42 Justin Edelstein: Oh, because it's on the Because there are there are do standing meetings well.

Jason Atwood: I'm not saying it's I'm not making a I b I'm doing is a point to sort of contention to sort of make people think about it and their useless meeting waste of time. There are obviously good instances for them but I think that they are overused I think they are bad management technique and I think that they're in the right scenario absolutely. But I think they're over overused and I don This is Who's why an hour why not zero? I want every meeting to have a zero time to start what what I mean Well, we use Salesforce, but what's that?

Justin Edelstein: It's just a fault. Yeah, but that's Salesforce I every calendar and that's not true at all. Yeah, pretty sure every calendar defaults an hour Well when I go to create something in my iCal just go to it and drag the amount of time I want

Jason Atwood: If you double click it will always just put the default for a meeting is an hour. I just did it in a minute, but I just drag.

Justin Edelstein: I want to go from this time to this time.

Jason Atwood: But I'm saying the default, if you just double click on it on a day, I'm doing do midway and I go double click. It's just an There's my other point. E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E- And that's why. And you know I- And you know what make a good point?

1:04:48 Justin Edelstein: Two projects that have standing meetings. That's their choice.

Jason Atwood: And I will say one of them. So your choice or their choice? Their choice. Both cases. Okay, me too. I'm in one. I lied before. You did lie. I knew you were in one. I'm in one that I... It was their choice and I fought against it.

Justin Edelstein: Fine, but with the same respect, you know... Do you not prepare for that meeting? Do you not go to that meeting with do you wait until that meeting to do your work? Or do you do the work when you need to do the work? No, but it doesn't stop you but the whole point is saying you're just like the greatest and you handle The best is that is it?

Jason Atwood: No, I'm saying that I Understand in my experience of being in this industry for very long that all the reasons that I'm saying the sending meetings are bad that this that those standing meetings all reflect that. Meaning that one meeting, whatever. But I have seen that meeting also has a period of time and it's sometimes not enough. No, I agree. I'm and I see people show up.

Justin Edelstein: Standing meetings. Yeah. One of which is very well thought out. an agenda goes out the day before with an update with very clear list of here's the thing it's kind of like a status report meeting right where instead of sending out a status report on you know at the end of the week it's let's have this meeting to do the status right and here's the things here's what we're going to talk about this week here's what I were delivered over the last week We've done all this stuff. I haven't waited till today.

Jason Atwood: You've seen it throughout the week. But here's a level setter. Here's a time to just go over it. But why do it once a week? Why not do it whenever you need a level set?

Justin Edelstein: That stuff happens ad hoc.

Jason Atwood: But you're unofficially limiting yourself. Let me tell you why.

Justin Edelstein: Because. because In this particular instant in both particular in both instances, and I think in your instance as well It's not you and a client It's you a client and another vendor or maybe another vendor or maybe another vendor Yeah, in my case one of my standing meetings is me our client and two other vendors. So it's our client and three other vendors with a set time where we can all get, I'll get together and talk about stuff. In the other case, it's, me, our client, and another vendor. So again, three different parties. And I know, we're going back and forth during the week with the client, and I know the client's going back and forth with their other vendors during the week. I'm copied on some of this stuff. All right, guys. We'll talk to you later.

Justin Edelstein: That's relevant to me I'm not on other things. This is a time where we can all get together and say okay the stuff that is overlapping. Overlapping that maybe we haven't talked about because you know we haven't talked about it. Why haven't talked about it? Why because it's worked that they're doing because we're waiting for our meeting to talk about it. Maybe maybe not. Maybe maybe it's stuck in some. project management thing.

1:07:51 Jason Atwood: You just hit it. You're saying you're waiting to talk about something. I get the idea, listen, the reason standing meetings happen is because people then say that piece of time is carved out and because I'm so busy and that I have no other time on the planet that I know that at least on that half an hour or once a week, I will be able to put my 30 minutes of attention towards that thing. But just as me saying that, you can see there's a problem. And the problem really isn't being solved by a standing meeting. The problem is time and attention. The problem is where is your where is it? And you don't need to have a thing blocked on your calendar. Calendar every week to make you do something to make you want to make you.

Justin Edelstein: Have attention towards something. Will you agree that there is a time and a place for a standing meeting?

Jason Atwood: I think they're so rare.

Justin Edelstein: But there is a time and a place for a standing meeting.

Jason Atwood: I can give you an example. I'm the one who came up with and have propagated that. You came up with that? I have propagated that is because it is a way to get people that are not on their job to get on their job. The reason that we usually do that and we have done it with some vendors is because there. They're not doing good. They're not paying attention. They're not responding. And so we so there is a time and a place for. But that's that's literally just to make them respond and to be accountable. Yeah, but it's a trick. It shouldn't have to be. You shouldn't have to use a standing. Yeah, but call not everybody has the same.

Justin Edelstein: Not everyone's on the same wavelength, not everyone's. got the same time and attention or attention to detail or even drive to do stuff if they're not pushed by certain motivations.

Jason Atwood: And that's okay. But you're saying that you're saying it's for it's not because the same thing means to happen. It's because people don't do work until they have a meeting to prove to show up and send it. But that's life. Man. That's people. No. I hope it's not. But I'm saying it's not good, it's not good. It's not to good, but it happens. Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I can solve for that in many different ways. And standing meeting is, and again, we are doing that because we as Arkus, or as employees of Arkus, are doing it as a way to force the issue with somebody else. So we can't control them. So what we do is we throw this thing out there that says, We're at least going to make sure you're paying attention for this period of time.

Jason Atwood: So that's sort of saying that's because we can't control the outcome, right? It makes sense to do it then and it's a very good, but that's usually last resort by the way. We don't do it. That's not the first resort. That's the last resort and it is a trick. It's a trick of human nature to get them on the call, to get them accountable for what they're doing or saying or whatever. It's not what I would suggest. It actually says that why standing meetings are no good because it then makes them talk about it, talk about something. So anyway, my blog post that no one's going to... It's something very important. I think people should hear about it and hear you know they have and they've heard my opinion. They've heard all about it. Tweet me at just edelstein.

1:11:30 Jason Atwood: No, I'd love to hear people about that. They think about my opinion on standing meanings.

Justin Edelstein: I'm sure you'll get a couple. I'm sure I will. at Jason and Mattwood.

Jason Atwood: All right, let's wrap it up. Anything else last things on meetings?

Justin Edelstein: And we really wish. And we just had our agenda here. We did our agenda in a Google Doc, which is one of our tools that make meetings better. We already talked about Google Docs being a tool that has really revolutionized for us the way that meetings. For us, it started with. to. the wave throwback. Yeah. Where wave was just a drink. Oh, love the wave drinking game. Where the Google Wave was was like revolutionary in the way that you can collaborate in real time with one another in a meeting context. Right. And Doc's has taken pretty much all of the things that wave did and. Yeah, now has added on top of that even more stuff. So what's some other tools? What was tools? Yeah, Salesforce from Salesforce.com for meeting requests, which syncs to our Google Calendar, which is down to our iCal via the Appirio Google Sync.

Justin Edelstein: That's correct. You know. could use use Cirrus or Google or Appirio, one or the other, whatever you feel like using, if you're using Google in the back end, or if you're using Outlook, you can use the native Salesforce Outlook connector if you'd like. I prefer GoToMeeting. You I think prefer WebEx, but for the most part, we use one of those two tools to provide both telephony for conference. calling as well as screen sharing because I mean, I always I always use go to and not just send out the dial in part, I always send out the entire thing. And I put in the meeting request, you can join the go to or not, but you can just use the dial in, right? And then while we're in the meeting, It's so much easier to just already be in the go-to and say let's just look at that right and that's the stuff that was missing years and years ago even like seven years ago or eight years ago and you started getting that stuff early on live office was it like Microsoft live office or something yeah it's one they bought it was terrible It had that meeting room in the whiteboard, so wonky.

Justin Edelstein: But I prefer GoToMeeting. I think you prefer WebEx, but are coming around to GoToMeeting. No, I,

Jason Atwood: Well, I actually use both. And so the one feature that GoToMeeting has that I absolutely love and now use it all the time, but people don't know I use it. And I've even done both. I've used GoToMeeting for the dial-in and... WebEx for the conference for the for the sharing is that go to meeting has the ability to have basically a conference line a dedicated conference line you set up by basically a reoccurring meeting every day.

1:14:30 Justin Edelstein: Oh, there's my standing meeting. It's not even every day when you click the checkbox that it's recurring. It's just That's it. There's no start date. There's no end date. It just goes. So you just create one. It's open.

Jason Atwood: And then it's an open line that people can join. No one has to start if two people go in, it's started. And it's a conference line that's dedicated. So what I have done, and again, my tips and tricks is that is a text expander for me. And so I type in GTM. or whatever. And it pops this thing. And not only that, I've now learned and put in mind a mobile link, which I'm trying to give everybody at Arca's here to do, which allows from any mobile phone. If you see it in your calendar, you can click on it and it'll dial you directly in. And including all the digital. Cause it just makes people's lives easier. I've heard. I it's actually say, Oh relent that because it makes my life. Easier. So I do that for dial-in.

Jason Atwood: If I'm just doing WebEx, I'll do WebEx. The problem with WebEx is that every- the dial-in for every call is different. So when you send out the WebEx request, I now put dial-in available when you log in because you log in, then you have to do the dial-in. And then it locks you to your voice so I can see who's talking, which is a nice feature. Go to does that too, but they have to hit the number. When they dial in, they have a code that says... that they are who they say they are. Right. But if you're sending out a standardized one, everybody doesn't have the same number. Everybody would have the same number, it wouldn't work.

Justin Edelstein: Well, no, nobody knows their number. If you're only sending them the phone number, you have to send. The full go to meeting request. So we use go to meeting and Webex Yep. For screen sharing all the time. So,

Jason Atwood: And then document. You use, and I use sometimes, Mobile Day, which is a iPhone app that reads to your calendar and makes non-clickable, non-clickable meeting room numbers clickable.

Justin Edelstein: So you can just dial it in. It understands the dial-ins and understands how to, how to dial you into a conference line.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. A few times it's failed on me. pissed me off, but we use that. That's really it, I mean, I was thinking like iCal, I use iCal for my calendaring on my desktop, it syncs with everything. We've talked about the family calender, I mean, we talked about that when I wrote the blog post. Yeah, that doesn't really have much to do with this though. I think the thing that happened for me whenever I left the big corporation and I got to consolidate my life. is that I've realized that my calendar is not just work. It is a combination of a and I want to have one view. It's the thing I missed when I worked at that big company. I want We've come from a world 20 years ago where you were from 8 in the morning until 5 at night, you were at work.

Jason Atwood: So you just schedule things. But that's not our world anymore. We're so fluid that I want to be able to overlay my tasks. or my calendar, my family calendar, my Arkus calendar, all in one so I can judge what's going to happen and then plan my days accordingly. The other tip that, you know, huge tip, but you know, is sort of, I'll take it away from the week review thing and just make it, is the reviewing of your calendar. going ahead a week at a time like on a Friday and just going hey what's coming up and being able to prepare for it see if things need to move or not that is huge huge huge for me i don't want to try anything else what else we don't use any tools no i think

1:17:54 Justin Edelstein: That's i think you've out covered it for meetings i can't think of another tool that we really i know i started from like a white board when we go or have people over into our conference room or go to someone else's office.

Jason Atwood: Now it's all built to stuff and we use Google, Google Apps for calendaring sort of the middle of the calendaring piece. I think that's what we said, we use Google Calendar. Yeah, I mean I don't use it, but I use it. Right, it's kind of in the middle. It's kind of like Gmail. Comes with the package. It's like the data's going through it, but I'm not using the interface to it ever.

Justin Edelstein: I mean, actually, you really never use it for anything.

Jason Atwood: So it's just sort of a data repository.

Justin Edelstein: All right. Although I do know that I do need for certain people, I go into Google, I create the invite in Google calendar, I then Come back into Salesforce, manually sync it at that very moment, so I'll forget about it later and then tie everything together. I think I just know they won't They're not, they're either going to accept it and not get it onto their calendar or they, they're just going to look at it and be like, right. a what is this?

Jason Atwood: So what is this? What is this thing? All right. Well, let's say for that episode, tell us if you liked it. It was, it was a certainly a long one. next week, I've been giving you the wrapping up signal for like. Yeah, I'm not paying attention to you because my calendar says we're supposed to be podcasting right now. That's true until six o'clock It was mine. Yeah Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's in my calendar hard landscape so Obviously this big news about Salesforce and Oracle and all this news to came out. We're not ignoring that. Yeah, we know about it We'll know about it. We'll let it all settle Marinate in the in the mine grapes. That's right. And then we'll come back to it next week And we'll talk about that. Can't believe you just used mind grapes.

Jason Atwood: Mind grapes. Why not?

Justin Edelstein: So I was just telling you about my mind grapes yesterday. I know you were. Like mind grapes. I'm going to start using that. It came right up.

Jason Atwood: So, but we do have a cloud focus app pick of the week. We do.

Justin Edelstein: So do mine's a kind of an expensive one and it's a piece of hardware.

Jason Atwood: So I did to you the thing that I don't want you to do to me, but I did to you anyway What'd you do to me? I saw this on the agenda and I looked at it. So I'm like, what's this cool?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it looks pretty cool yeah, so I was at a Festival concert festival this past weekend. I forget why you picked this. Yeah, okay, so this last past weekend Friday through Sunday, up in North Adams, Massachusetts. What was the festival? It's the Wilco Solid Sound Festival at Mass Mocha. They do this every year. And, Wilco are great. I'm going to get some comments about Wilco and the tweets. anyway, so. So it's all day. Yeah, and all day, baby Saturday. It's a long day So like, you know, it opens up for like 11 11 30 and Wilco is playing Until like 11 30 or 12 that night. So you're there for 12 hours It's also took me about an hour to get there from where I was driving from right Your phone is not gonna make it because you're taking pictures you're instagramming you're tweeting you're doing this You're doing all the things I really enjoy music is about Taking little videos of stuff and posting out there you're doing stuff, right?

1:21:37 Justin Edelstein: I really well in Instagram now with their new video stuff Twitter has fine Twitter is mine and Facebook has Instagram videos. There's all sorts of stuff going on. We can talk about that next week So anyway, I get food at one of the food trucks that they've got going on there. And I sit down at a picnic table and this guy's setting up this thing, this this like tower that has all these dongles sticking out of the back of it. And I'm like, whoa, is that a charger? He goes... Yeah, I'm like, can I I could just plug in my phone? It'll charge. He's like, yep. It's just this free standing thing. That's just sitting there. Yep. So I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. It kind of looks like a canister. Yeah. And and then he made it even cooler.

Justin Edelstein: He plugged Solar panel into it. So and I was like, what did you just do? He's like well once it's fully charged It'll charge phones for like four days. Yeah, but you plug this solar panel into it It'll just keep you know, and it renewable renewable Whatever resources energy, whatever it just keeps sort of charging itself and then it can charge I mean this dongle he had plugged into the back of it had a plug for like every single device that you can ever imagine So it wasn't a USB plug-in or was it it was anything you it was one end was USB the other end had about 14 different things you could have just walked up put lightning. Oh, yeah straight out Just could have plugged right in with my USB You know iPhone 5 light so tell us what it is It's a charger.

Justin Edelstein: It's called the Escape 150 Power Pack by Goal Zero. So you can go to goalzero.com and check it out. It's $159. So if you're a camper, if you're someone who does stuff in the great outdoors, if you live in a flood zone and want something that'll charge things, I mean, this thing's $159. They make things that are two thousand bucks like generators for your house. Yeah All with this solar stuff going on. I I thought it was really cool That's kind of the kind of like the theme of the festival is very like crunchy and like Hippie ish so they had these solar panel charger things for your iphone 5 which is Kind of ridiculous right but there's no waste that gets made I mean they had some ridiculous things there. They were serving You'd go to like a food vendor and you'd want a bottle of water Yeah, you wouldn't get a bottle of water you get a box of water and it said boxed water is better on the box, like a carton.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's like easier to, you know, you can ship more of it, because it's flat as it ships, it's biodegradable and this, that, and the other. I was like, oh man, look at this place. I used to think there's a winemaker that makes boxed wine that's like, there's lots of it.

1:24:37 Jason Atwood: There's lots of it. And we used to love it, we'd say bandit, we'd get the bandit, because it wasn't a bottle of wine, it was a small cylinder bottle, but it's good, it was good pinot, just saying. Good boxed wine. Good boxed wine. Bye. That's your pick.

Justin Edelstein: Now you said it's $150. I did look it up and the solar thing for it is... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then there's the $159 for the thing itself that you can charge with by plugging it into a wall. The solar accessory I think is another $1.50 or so. Is something? Yeah. That basically makes it like, you know, alright. if I'm going camping or I'm really preparing for a storm or Sandy comes to mind here in the northeast. It's one of those things that oh maybe this might be worth it to have.

Jason Atwood: I mean it's I think you can plug in more. I think I already can plug in more. You can plug in like regular. phone Jack's like yeah, you can do 20 or 21 10 to plug things right into it right so it's not just a USB thing That's also dude. It's a power source. You can plug in your computer. Yeah, it's a superpower source, right?

Justin Edelstein: Huh? Nothing. I'm out something. Oh, well, I shouldn't amount. Yeah, I should have typed. Yeah. All right. That's good. Good job, buddy So good one.

Jason Atwood: I actually looked at it. I thought it was great. I mean, I have one that you gave me for the holidays. I gave you one that you crank. Yes. And then the other business partner gave me one that's a battery I've used a couple times pretty successfully. I haven't I don't know what its limits are, but I've recharged my iPad, iPhone and then iPod touch over one night and I did all those three and it was still hanging in there. I was like, okay. So like when I... So it's nice. Like you put that when you call on vacation, it just gives you another kind of like, if something happens, happens, but this one's definitely not like a vacation thing. This is like a home camping.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, this is like a home or you're going camping. It's, it's part of like your repertoire. Right. On tailgating, whatever. Right. Tailgating. Oh, yeah. Now I have the car. Power stuff with it. Car sit.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. All right. Well, I'm doing one that's not $150. That's good. Very important in the next few days. Very important. So as everybody in the world knows, Google Reader is going away as of July 1st. And I waited until last week to sort of make a choice and to move away. I was reading articles and I was like, this is good, that is good. And eventually I was like, all right, I'm just going to pick one. And I was reading about Feedly and I'm like, all right, let me just go, let me try it. And they went from a company that used to read Google Reader, read the thing, to then they switched it to now pull in and keep. So it doesn't push back to Google Reader because Google Reader would go away. Anyway, Feedly is a RSS reader.

Jason Atwood: And you know what? It's really, really nice. It's very customizable. It's very clean and good looking. This really,

Justin Edelstein: You know, this is really great. I just did it. in two seconds. It went from the time you started talking to now why you were paying attention to me in the meeting.

1:27:48 Jason Atwood: It just, oh off me right in and just pulled everything out of my google reader and I'm assuming it's now just in my feedly account. Yeah it's really well done and free. They do have ads so just don't know they have at when you're looking at like a section that has ads. Again, for you who are still using Google Reader, you want to stay doing reading stuff, Feedly is a good option. Yeah, it's nice. Pretty cool. This is my pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, a paperless, what's the other one, hit one of their, oh getting T group in there. And you always go to blog.archaesinc.com to read my blog, which will be up next week, which we won't really talk about next week because it's really about this week's blog, but we'll mention that it's there.

Jason Atwood: A week behind action. That will be up next week or it will be up sooner, but probably next And that's it. This is the link in out- place in the world leave us know tell us what you thought should am i wrong am i wrong about standing meetings or not am i wrong am i wrong am i wrong am i wrong and then we'll be back next Enjoy those cloudy days.