We all have sat through meetings that appear out of the blue, derail our day, and leave everyone wondering what just happened.
According to Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index Annual Report, the average Teams user has experienced a staggering 252% increase in weekly meeting time from 2020, and the number of weekly meetings has also risen by 153%.
While the increase in meeting frequency may sometimes feel overwhelming, regular check-ins are important in maintaining consistent communication and aligning teams.
Recurring meetings are an effective way to achieve this. Let’s explore the best practices for planning and scheduling recurring meetings to maximize their impact.
How to Plan and Schedule Recurring Meetings
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Are Recurring Meetings?
Recurring meetings are pre-scheduled and repetitive meetings that happen weekly, monthly, or quarterly. These regular intervals ensure ongoing communication, helping your team members effectively communicate their ideas, progress, and problems at the right time.
One example of recurring meetings is stand-up meetings, in which each participant briefly gives an update on their current work. A successful stand-up meeting provides important insights to the team lead and sets clear timelines for project completion.
🧠 Fun Fact: The average stand-up meeting lasts about 15 minutes—short enough to keep everyone focused but long enough to align the team. However, shortening stand-ups further can increase team engagement, as it encourages concise updates and fewer tangents.
Importance of recurring meetings
When managed effectively, recurring meetings can drive productivity and improve decision-making. Companies can benefit from regular check-ins, which help clarify goals and address ongoing challenges.
Here’s how:
Consistency and accountability
Recurring meetings maintain consistent communication and accountability, whether your team works in the office or remotely. By their very nature, these meetings require attendees to come prepared, share updates, and actively participate in discussions.
Progress monitoring
Team members can easily track long-term projects and timelines to review ongoing work, discuss project progress, and address any issues. The structured nature of recurring meetings establishes a rhythm, ensuring that all participants know when and where to meet. This is particularly beneficial when managing large teams or complex projects.
Team building
Recurring meetings help develop a sense of camaraderie and mutual understanding, which is essential for creating a productive and collaborative environment. They allow team members to solve challenges together, seek help, and celebrate milestones.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest Practices for Productive Recurring Meetings
While recurring meetings are beneficial, they can also lead to problems if improperly organized
For example, if you cancel a recurring meeting without prior information, people may waste their time waiting for the meeting
To prevent such scenarios, we recommend adopting these best practices for productive meetings:
Set clear objectives
All recurring meetings that you schedule should have clear objectives. This way, people can figure out how to prepare for the meeting. Not setting clear meeting goals can be unproductive, wasting time better spent on actionable tasks.
This also helps keep the discussions focused, ensuring the participants understand and work toward the desired outcomes. With everyone’s ideas on the table, you can decide on a course to achieve your goals.
Choose the right frequency and duration
👀 Did You Know? According to Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index Annual Report, inefficient meetings are reported as the top productivity killer, with too many meetings ranking third.
This highlights why choosing the right frequency and duration for meetings is important—getting the balance right can help avoid unnecessary interruptions and keep productivity on track.
Would you like to participate in a recurring meeting more than twice a week? Keeping aside the exceptional cases, what would you discuss daily with no real progress?
Meetings that run too long lose participants’ engagement, distract them from their purpose, and waste time. This is why, if you’re conducting a recurring meeting once or twice every week, the ideal duration is 30–60 minutes.
💡Pro Tip: Adjust meeting frequency to suit team needs—too often, and you risk burnout; too rarely, and you lose direction.
Create and share agendas
An agenda provides key meeting information, helping the participants know what to expect. Knowing what will be discussed in a meeting helps save time and jump right into the discussion.
Before you get overwhelmed with questions about what information to include in your future meetings’ agendas and where to share it, we are here with the answers!
An ideal meeting agenda includes information such as the meeting time, place, and discussion topic. To organize and structure this information, you can use Clickup’s Agenda Template, which lets you share all the important information in one place.
Meeting details can include the type, scope, date, time, and location (in-person meeting room or a link for remote meetings). With this template, you can:
- Assign specific roles to participants, such as facilitator, note-taker, and attendees, ensuring clarity of responsibilities
- Create a table that outlines the agenda, corresponding action items, and the responsible person for each task
- Track each attendee’s progress, ensuring they meet their goals on time and remain accountable to the group
- Add post-meeting details to your agenda, such as the meeting recap (or a recorded meeting link) and information about the next meeting.
To share this agenda, you can either use a public or restricted link, download it in PDF, HTML, or markdown format, and mail it. You can also upload the file to Google Drive and attach the file’s link to the scheduled meeting invite to everyone’s calendar.
Sharing this agenda with internal team members is even easier with ClickUp—the everything app for work—that centralizes project, document, and knowledge management. You can directly invite the desired team members to the document or share it within a workspace or team space on ClickUp.
Encourage participation
There is no point in hosting a meeting if no one shows up, right? Your role doesn’t end with planning and scheduling meetings. You need to ensure these team meetings are fun, productive, and engaging to encourage diverse perspectives during a meeting.
After you’ve scheduled a meeting, clearly outline and align the follow-up actions to translate the meeting discussions into tangible outcomes. However, if you hate taking notes (like all of us!), you can use ClickUp’s Meeting Minutes Template to create structured meeting notes.
💡Pro Tip: Craft agendas using metrics, project timelines, or KPIs to ensure meetings are outcome-oriented rather than just a litany of status updates.
The template’s easy-to-use format, with pre-built pages for meeting summaries, ensures you capture key outcomes and learnings. It’s a collaborative tool that is great for both beginners and experienced users and is fully customizable.
What’s more? With ClickUp Brain, you can automatically summarize meeting discussions and turn them into actionable tasks. You can then assign these tasks to your team members in ClickUp and send automated follow-up reminders to get updates on their progress.
This way, meeting participants can immediately focus on their action items and commit to deadlines. It also lets your team concentrate on high-value activities instead of getting bogged down in administrative work.
With ClickUp Brain, you can easily create meeting agendas by entering key details like objectives, participants, and topics. This streamlines the planning process and ensures everyone is on the same page before the meeting starts.
But to make all this magic happen, you need the right tools. Tools like ClickUp, Google Calendar, Zoom, and AI-powered assistants help manage scheduling, documenting, and tracking recurring meetings. We’ll talk about them in more detail in the next section!
With ClickUp’s comprehensive task management features like automatic task updates, you can ensure your teams are on track with recurrence patterns for key projects, providing consistent communication and progress tracking.
🧠Fun Fact: McKinsey reports that frontrunners in AI adoption are seeing an average cost reduction of 5-10%. At the same time, they’re shifting their employees’ focus to more valuable tasks and fostering innovation. This could mean faster cycles in R&D testing or code development or simply encouraging greater creativity among their teams.
Also Read: How to Run a Postmortem Meeting
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Schedule a Recurring Meeting
Setting clear objectives, selecting the right meeting frequency, and leveraging tools like ClickUp Meetings, Google Calendar, and Zoom can lead to productive, engaging meetings that drive project progress and ensure accountability.
Scheduling recurring meetings in various meeting tools
If you are looking for a place to centralize your calendars and keep track of all meetings and tasks, ClickUp is the right tool for you. It integrates with your existing calendar apps and syncs with them in real time.
If you have a meeting scheduled on your Google Calendar events, Zoom, or Apple Calendar, you can view all these in the ClickUp Calendar View. You can also create small pre- and post-meeting tasks and set up reminders for their completion to ensure high meeting productivity.
If multiple tasks and meetings are scheduled for the same day, you can drag and drop them into the right slots and adjust their priority to highlight important tasks and meetings first. Plus, the daily, weekly, and monthly views allow you to visualize your work and keep track of progress for the relevant time period.
Syncing ClickUp with calendar apps
Here are the steps to sync ClickUp with other calendar apps:
- Open ClickUp. Go to the quick actions menu by clicking on the icon next to your profile icon in the top right corner
- Navigate to the App Centre
- Select all the apps you want to integrate with ClickUp
- On the new window, click on connect, and you will be redirected to the login page for your Google account associated with Google Calendar
- Agree to the necessary terms and conditions and set permissions. Once done, click Allow, and you’re all set
In ClickUp, all events are identified as ClickUp Tasks. Once you have integrated your calendar, you can use ClickUp’s Meeting Template to organize your meetings (tasks).
This template shows all scheduled tasks and their details, including the topic, time estimate, due date, and priority.
Creating a recurring task (meeting) in ClickUp
Now that you have integrated ClickUp with your other calendars, let’s see how to schedule a meeting in ClickUp:
- Open ClickUp and navigate to the Calendar View, or use the Task View to create a new event
- Click on the Add Task button in the top right corner to start scheduling the meeting
- Add a meeting title, due date, priority, and other details
- To make the task recurring, go to meetings from the left panel and navigate to the meeting you want to set as recurring. Under the due date column, click on the calendar icon and click on Set recurring in the bottom left corner
- Assign this task to the appropriate team members. To set reminders, navigate to the task in the calendar, right click on the task, and click on Remind me
- Save and view the meeting alongside tasks, projects, and deadlines on your centralized calendar
Having everything in a single place helps make managing a large team much easier. If a task progresses slowly, you can edit the priority or set reminders for quick completion. You can also add a time tracker to any task (meeting) and track the time spent in each meeting.
Scheduling recurring meetings in Google Calendar
Who hasn’t heard of Google Calendar? It’s free and easy to use.
Let’s see how you can schedule a recurring meeting in Google Calendar:
- Open Google Calendar, click on the ‘Create’ button in the top left corner, and select Event from the drop-down menu
- Enter the meeting details, such as the meeting title, date, and time
- Under the “Does not repeat” dropdown, choose the recurrence pattern—this could be daily, weekly, monthly, or customize it to fit your preferred frequency
- Send a meeting request to meeting attendees by entering their email addresses
- Set any necessary reminders or notifications, and click Save
- Your calendar event will be created and added to the Google Calendar of all invited participants
Scheduling recurring team meetings in Zoom
Follow these steps to schedule a recurring meeting in Zoom:
- Sign in to your Zoom account
- Click on the Schedule a Meeting option from the dashboard
- Fill in the meeting title, description, and time
- Check the Recurring meeting box
- Select the recurrence settings, including the frequency, end date, and how often the meeting will repeat (daily, weekly, etc.). Once finished, click save
- Copy the generated meeting link or send a meeting invite directly to your participants
ClickUp’s integration with Google Calendar and Zoom allows you to schedule and manage discussions while ensuring your meeting details are stored in one place. You can also set reminders to notify participants before the meeting, encouraging more participation.
The ClickUp Zoom integration is a fantastic way to boost your productivity by connecting task management with video conferencing.
Here’s what it can do for you:
- Schedule meetings easily: You can schedule a recurring Zoom meeting directly from your ClickUp Tasks, making it quick and hassle-free
- Stay updated: Get notifications about new Zoom meetings related to your tasks, keeping your team in the loop
- Start instant meetings: Launch Zoom meetings directly from ClickUp Tasks or Chat with simple commands
- Access recordings: If you record a meeting, ClickUp can link to the recordings and transcripts, making important info easy to find
This integration helps you streamline your workflows by combining project management with communication tools, making everything more efficient!
Summarize this article for me pleaseStay Organized and Updated with ClickUp
One can’t claim that they remember each item on their weekly to-do list (and, if they do, they are lying!)
Recurring meetings help you remember and keep tabs on things easily by maintaining consistent communication, tracking project progress, and fostering collaboration within teams. Productive meetings are a powerful tool for keeping teams connected, especially in today’s hybrid and remote work environments.
ClickUp makes scheduling recurring meetings easy, keeps all your meeting details in one place, and enables easy tracking of action items and progress. Its powerful integrations with the meeting tools you use daily make it the perfect choice for bringing your tasks and conversations together into one platform.
Get started with ClickUp today!
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