Add your friends
Subtract your enemies
Multiply your joys
Divide your sorrows
and draw a circle with God as center
and love as radius
ANON

In the workplace, time is of the essence, and meetings can be the ultimate timewaster. How can you avoid wasting time and run the most efficient meetings possible?
Try these tips
- Start and finish the meeting on time. If there’s more to consider, plan the appropriate follow-up actions or schedule another meeting.
- At the close of the meeting, ask if participants are comfortable with the outcomes.
- Make sure all meeting participants know that you expect them to be on time and prepared to discuss their agenda items.
- Encourage everyone to speak up. Quieter people may have valuable contributions, but they may need some encouragement to share them.
- Provide a detailed agenda for each meeting. It should include topics for and the purpose of discussion, as well as a discussion leader and time allotment for each topic. Distribute the agenda a couple of days before the meeting so that meeting participants have time to prepare.
- Assign someone to take notes in each meeting. That way, decisions and follow-up action items are documented and can be circulated to the meeting’s participants.
- Determine which meetings are really necessary. If the objective of a meeting is to simply update others about ongoing projects, it might make more sense to send a memo or group e-mail, or to post the information on your company’s computer network. However, for in-depth discussions, meetings generally work best.

Making friends is more an act of discovery than manufacturing.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.