New Year’s resolutions: hold better meetings in 2019

We’re one month into 2019 – how are your New Year’s resolutions going? If you’ve stuck to them, congratulations! If not, don’t stress. Often we’re way too ambitious with our goals, resolving to exercise every day, quit smoking, learn Mandarin… But there’s something you should know: fewer than 10% of the people that make New Year’s resolutions actually stick to them for longer than a month. The reason? We tend to set unrealistic goals for ourselves, then give up on them when it proves difficult to follow them through. Psychologists suggest that to set ourselves up for success in the new year, we should break our big ambitions down into smaller, achievable goals. Resolving to become fluent in Mandarin in 12 months is setting yourself up for failure; resolving to enroll in a weekly Mandarin class for beginners puts you on the path to success.

The same principle applies to your workplace resolutions: set unrealistic, overly-ambitious goals, and you may well give up on them before January 31st rolls around. If you commit to realistic, measurable resolutions, on the other hand, you’re far more likely to create lasting positive changes in your workplace. It’s all well and good resolving to hold better meetings in 2019, but breaking this down into more achievable goals – and making clever use of Doodle Premium’s special features – is the best way to make sure you stick to your goal. We’ll get the ball rolling with a few positive changes you can make in the new year:

Resolution 1: Manage Meeting Admin, Fast!

Since you’re here, reading the Doodle blog, we’re going to go ahead and assume you’ve already said goodbye to long email chains trying to settle on a time and place for your next meeting – a.k.a you’re already a Doodle user! In 2019, streamline all the admin that comes with setting up a meeting even further, with Doodle Premium’s handy deadline feature. Set a deadline for participants to respond to your meeting invitation request, and get that meeting in your calendar asap!

Resolution 2: Be Prepared!

Be honest: are meetings at your workplace filled with perfectly prepped participants? Or are half the people in the room frantically checking through emails and powerpoints as they try and get a handle on what’s happening? Set yourself up for meeting success in 2019 by including a message comments with your Doodle Premium meeting invitation requests: a gentle reminder that everyone should familiarise themselves with last quarter’s numbers beforehand should cut down unproductive umm-ing and ah-ing in the meeting itself.

Resolution 3: Stay Connected

A successful meeting is one with a meaningful follow-up: don’t leave the connections you’ve made or the ideas you’ve generated in the meeting room. With Doodle Premium, at the same time you send a meeting invitation request, you can ask participants to add their preferred contact information. After the meeting, you can easily circulate the participants’ contacts between them. Now, meeting participants can keep the conversation going, even if they weren’t connected before.

Resolution 4: Hold Regular 1:1 Check-Ins

While you’re streamlining your meeting processes for 2019, don’t forget that some of the most crucial meetings are the one-on-one chats you hold within your team. Meeting individually with key colleagues helps build your working relationship, manage your expectations of each other, and stay on track when it comes to achieving shared goals. Now, all Doodle users can send 1:1 meeting requests to anyone in their network, and organize individual meetings with the same ease and efficiency as a regular Doodle meeting invitation request.

There you have it: a small, manageable list of goals that will set you up for success next year. We have a sneaky feeling that your 2019 meetings are set to be your best yet!