How To Be a Meeting Ninja

If you're reading this blog then when you see a new book titled, How to be a Productivity Ninja, it catches your attention.

And that's exactly what happened to us:

Reinventing Teleconferencing With The Double

Back in the mid 90's my family received an odd gift from a close family friend - a video phone. 

He worked at AT&T at the time. He'd snagged of one of their new demo video phones to play around with when he quickly realized Problem #1: Video phones were worthless if no one else had one.

It's easy to scoff at the thing now. I think we used it maybe three times ever. And it wasn't so much a "video" phone as it was a collection of still images that would update every 30-60 seconds. Remember connection speeds back then?

The screen...well HD was still years away.

Like our good friend realized, since no one else we knew had a video phone it just collected dust.

And look at the marketing! Is this family having a video call or posing for Glamour Shots?!

How To: Add Agendas & Tags to Google Calendar Meeting Invites

We've been asked a few times recently how to add Tags and Agendas to meetings in Google Calendar.

Sounds like a perfect topic for a blog post.

Why Add a Plan in Google Calendar?

Sure you can add tags & agendas directly in Less Meeting. Do this in Google Calendar when you create your invite, though, and reduce the number of steps it takes to create a new meeting.

And if you're trying to run better meetings, you'll also know that sending out the meeting plan to attendees before the meeting is a must.

Ok I'm In, How Do I Add a Plan to GCal?

It's super straight forward. Just follow these 2 steps:

1. Sync your Less Meeting & Google Calendar accounts. Do that here

2. Type out your Agenda & Tags in the description, like this:

 

How to Format Your Agenda & Tags

When typing out your plan there are some simple format requirements.

Agendas
- Start with the text, "Agenda:"
- Add the agenda number followed by a right parenthesis. Like this, "1)", "2)", and so on
- Optional: add each agenda length. Format is "(X min)" where X is the number of minutes
- Optional: add sub-agendas. Format is "- " followed by the title

Tags
- Start with the text, "Tags:"
- Separate each tag with a comma
- Add as many tags as you want

That's all there is to it. Less Meeting does the rest, automatically reading your plan and adding it to your meeting.

Enjoy!