Comments on: Do conference calls kill your productivity?

By: Yahoo! Detector

Yahoo! Detector — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:26:39 +0000

yes, I absolutely agree with you, I am working on it too! thanks.

By: Luke

Luke — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:39:01 +0000

Great post!

By: Carl Smith

Carl Smith — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:45:17 +0000

Great post Adam. Another thing we’ve done in the past is put a start and end time in the header of the nGenda. Oh sorry, agenda for you non-nGeneers.

By stating the end date in writing and referencing it when you start you are acting like a business that respects time aka money.

Depending on the client I’ll sometimes start a meeting by saying “and if we want to stay on budget we need to wrap this up in 1 hour max.”

Amazing how a call only takes 20 minutes once that connection takes with a client.

Thanks again for the great post!

By: Adam Little

Adam Little — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:38:55 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Chad! Mondays are one of our craziest days too. We’re going to do some brainstorming in the coming weeks to see how we can better manage our time to prevent that “spun wheels” feeling. If we find a solution that works for us, we’ll be sure to share it with everyone. Thanks again for the comment and we hope we’ll continue to see you around the site!

By: Chad Engle

Chad Engle — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:24:09 +0000

Your five points:

1. Have an agenda:
2. He who calls it, runs it
3. Keep it short
4. Do a recap of the call before hanging up
5. Send out meeting notes to the team

Are a great way to keep things under control. I think the first one is especially important because if you don’t have an agenda then you are wasting time and if you are wasting time you are wasting time that you could be billing. Which in your case could be wearing multiple hats. Kudos for 5 points to take away.

Yes, I also feel that if I have several calls in a day (usually Monday’s with recaps and what not) that I have spun wheels, I feel burnt out and not very creative so, I feel your pain.