You can connect online better than in real life 👉 here’s how

Heyo 👋 Jordan here,

ℹ️ If someone sent you this, someone believes in you. They know you have what it takes to take your meetings to a whole other level!

There we were super happy to go to our offices, work our 9-5s, and spend hours in traffic.

And then Covid had to ruin it for us 👀

Okay, working from home is pretty sweet. But there is one thing that we (leaders) absolutely suck at:

🗓️ Online Meetings

Let me apologize in advance for all the "this should've been an email" meetings by me and other leaders out there 👀. We're trying to do better!

Meetings suck for 3 reasons:

1. There are too many of them.

2. Most meetings are a one-sided monologue.

3. Most people suck at organizing meetings (I sure did for 3 years).

But:

Meetings are also the best way to connect with people (remotely that is).

And they don't have to suck!

Here's how:

🖨️ The Michael Scott Way

Let's organize the worst possible meeting:

1. Invite everyone. Even people who aren’t interested in the topic might hear something useful — no need to repeat yourself.

2. Make it longer than necessary. 90 minutes is a minimum. Just in case!

3. Make sure there are zero breaks between your meeting and the one before & the one after it. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for everybody 😴.

4. Spend 90% of the time going over facts & data. Who has the time to write an email? Plus, you already get so many emails every day — emails suck!

5. Skip the agenda. Planning takes too much extra time (no one reads those agendas anyway).

Bonus: Keep the longest, toughest meetings for Friday afternoon.

Perfection.

Reversing those is enough to get your meetings from bad to okay.

Okay is not enough.

✅ The Effective Meeting Rulebook

Now, the non-obvious stuff.

Here are my 5 rules for effective meetings 👇

1. Breaks are essential. Microsoft found that short 10-minute breaks between back-to-back meetings can reduce stress buildup by over 80%. I suggest making your meetings either 25 minutes or 50 minutes long. Anything over that typically gets hit hard by Parkinson's Law and becomes a waste of time.

2. Not a meeting. Not an email. Both. Meetings are the best place for a discussion. Email is the best approach for sharing (& documenting) information. Send an email with the majority of the info you care about, and use the meeting to tell a short story and discuss.

3. Ditch recurring meetings. We love default options. If the default option is to enter a meeting and spend 30-60 minutes, most people would do that instead of canceling or bothering to explain why they're skipping. Either organize every recurring meeting one by one manually (yes, it's boring, that means you'll do it only if necessary) or at least set the meeting to stop repeating after 3-5 times. Use the opened time in your calendar for short & sweet ad-hoc discussions.

4. Always have that camera on. 65% of communication is non-verbal. By turning off your camera you're removing 65% of the tools we have to communicate. Act accordingly.

5. Take agendas to heart. Write them, follow them, and help teach others read them before the meeting. This will open up a lot of other opportunities for preparation before the meeting and ensure everyone enters with the same context.

Extra: A presentation is about the presenter, not the slides. If everyone just spent 30 minutes reading your presentation, you did something wrong.

Follow those steps and, I guarantee you, in just a few weeks your meetings will look completely different.

📸 Extra: how to improve your video quality

I published a detailed thread to get you started with this last Sunday:(the short version: get a good wired mic & keep it close to your mouth)

💡 Quote of the week

🔥 Epic Things

• Lumix S5 — I have two of those! Nothing in the $2300 range is even close value-wise to this beast. They're whole $500 off for Black Friday 🤯. If you want to be serious about video — I can't recommend those enough.

• Talk to Books — Use Google's AI to find stuff in books. Simple, easy, and free.

• Deepstash — Find 5-minute summaries of books and articles. Free and they have a very friendly community.

👀 New Content

One new video for you 👉 Build motivation so powerful you don’t know what to do (you need this)

And one interesting thread explaining my process behind using AI to help me with thumbnails 👉 How I use AI as just step 1 to generate beautiful images

I hope this was helpful!

If you did, why not share it with a friend?

You might be the reason their meetings became legendary.

Thanks!

Your biggest fan,— Jordan