All meetings have a clear purpose
You only attend a meeting if you have to
Meetings end when their goal is achieved
What you decide actually happens
Meeting efficiency and time spend
Meeting style
Workflow and meeting processes
Your team’s network
Evaluation of team collaboration tools
Vital is a simple process for better meetings. It's an easy set of principles and practices that help ensure:
The result of practicing Vital is highly-improved meeting quality, shorter and fewer meetings overall, and gains in employee focus and satisfaction that come with better meetings. Vital also builds stronger teams because it emphasizes greater appreciation for each other’s time. It also enables people not present at meetings to benefit from their occurrence, reducing the need for the overall proportion of meetings anyone might need to attend.
Every meeting run according to Vital must pass the PANTS Test. Pants stands for Purpose, Agenda, Notes, Tasks, Shared. In more detail, the PANTS Test means:
The average worker today is distributed, diverse, and distracted. Meeting organizers must do everything they can to make things easy on meeting participants—which means putting a meeting’s purpose, agenda, notes, and tasks in the same accessible, shareable place every time.
That place is the calendar entry. When you schedule a meeting, you send a calendar invite to everyone. This calendar entry is the only artifact that is guaranteed to be common, shared, and accessible among all meeting attendees.
Not your email, not your Google Doc, not your Slack message, not your Confluence project—all of these other systems may also be good places for meeting-related information, but every person and team’s work habits and platforms are different. That’s why Vital takes a calendar-first approach to transparency; it’s foolproof.
This means that meeting agendas belong with the calendar event so they are accessible to all attendees—even if you also communicate them using a different channel like email. Meeting follow-up notes should also be linked in the calendar—even if you also save them to your CRM or elsewhere.
Because Vital helps you avoid wasted, unfocused meetings, it saves you a ton of time. In fact, every activity you might feel that takes time, actually saves you more in the long term.
Is explicitly stating the goal of a meeting a waste of time? No. It takes one sentence. Don’t worry about word-smithing it; just make sure everyone who shows up to the meeting knows why they’re there.
Is setting an agenda a waste of time? No. You almost certainly get back more time in a smoothly run meeting.
What about having everyone share one meeting note document? Definitely not. You’re avoiding otherwise duplicated work by sharing that responsibility together.
What about assigning tasks? Seriously? How is work supposed to get done if nobody takes charge of doing it?
Lastly, is sharing your meeting purpose, agenda, notes, and tasks worth the time? Absolutely. It guarantees people can show up prepared, get value from the meeting, and potentially not even need to attend the meeting because they can see the notes instead.