What belongs in a meeting agenda
A meeting agenda template does two jobs. Before the meeting, it tells people whether to come and how to prepare. During the meeting, it gives the facilitator something to point at when a topic runs long. Every section in the template above serves one of those two jobs.
- Purpose. One sentence that names what the meeting must produce. "Decide which two experiments continue" is a purpose. "Discuss experiments" is a topic.
- Attendees with optional marked. People who are optional for one item can join for that item and leave. Saying so in the agenda is kinder than letting them sit through forty minutes.
- Pre-reads with reading time. Two minutes of reading written next to the link gets read. "See attached" does not.
- Items with an owner, a time box and an outcome. The outcome word (inform, discuss, decide) is what separates an agenda from a list of topics.
- Parking lot. A place for the topic that always appears and is never on the agenda.
- Actions and next meeting. Five minutes at the end, protected, because this is where the meeting turns into work.
What does not belong: the discussion itself. An agenda that already contains the arguments is a memo. Send the memo as a pre-read and keep the agenda short.
How to write an agenda in ten minutes
- Start from the purpose. If you cannot finish the sentence "by the end of this meeting we will have", cancel the meeting or make it a message.
- List topics, then cut. Write down everything, then remove anything that is purely informational and could be a paragraph in the pre-read. Four items is a good number for 45 minutes.
- Order by importance, not by logic. The decision goes second or third, after a short opener. The item most likely to run over goes last, where overrunning hurts least.
- Assign owners and minutes. Ask each owner whether their time box is realistic. They will usually ask for more; give it to them and cut a different item.
- Send it with the pre-reads. One working day ahead for routine meetings. Longer for decisions.
The meeting agenda examples above follow this process for five very different meetings. The quarterly planning one shows how the same structure stretches to a half day: breaks become numbered items, and the hard stop is written into the header.
Running the meeting from the agenda
This is the part most agenda templates skip. The agenda is only useful if someone uses it in the room.
- Open each item by reading its outcome. "Item three, twenty minutes, we decide which two experiments continue." People behave differently once they know a decision is coming.
- When an item runs over, name it. "We are five minutes over on this. Do we extend and cut item four, or park it?" Ask the room, decide in ten seconds, and write the result down. Silent overruns are how the decision at the end disappears.
- Parking lot without debate. When someone raises a new topic, write it in the parking lot out loud ("parked: moving the weekly to Tuesday") and return to the item. The person feels heard and the agenda survives.
- Protect the last five minutes. When the final slot starts, stop the discussion wherever it is. Read out every action with its owner and date. Give each parked item a fate: scheduled, assigned, or dropped.
From agenda to notes
The agenda and the notes should be the same document. Take notes as fragments under each numbered item while it is being discussed, then spend ten minutes afterwards turning fragments into decisions with reasons and actions with dates. The meeting notes template describes that close-out in detail. For a formal body that needs a record of motions and votes rather than working notes, the meeting minutes template is the right follow-on.
Common mistakes
- Topics without outcomes. "Budget" could mean a two-minute update or a forty-minute fight. Say which.
- The decision scheduled last. It gets cut the first time anything runs over, which is every time.
- Every item owned by the organizer. That is a presentation. If nobody else owns an item, consider whether the meeting should be an email.
- No parking lot. Off-agenda topics then either hijack the meeting or get lost. Both are worse than a bullet under a heading.
- Pre-reads sent with the agenda an hour before. Nobody reads them, and the first fifteen minutes of the meeting are spent reading them aloud.
When to use a different template
A daily standup does not need this much structure; the standup meeting template is three questions and a blocker list. A one-on-one is owned by the report, not the manager, and has its own rhythm; see the one-on-one meeting template. A project kickoff wants more space for scope and roles than a regular agenda gives, which the project kickoff meeting template provides. And for sprint planning, where the agenda is really the backlog, use the sprint planning template.
Write the agenda once, take the notes in the same place
Save this agenda as a template in Scribelet, open it before each meeting with the date filled in, and type notes under the items as you go. Actions become tracked tasks with due dates. Encrypted, free to start.
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