--- title: "Meetings Worth Attending: Agendas, Recordings and Actions | StartCloud" url: https://startcloud.au/learn/meetings-worth-attending description: "Module 4 of our free Microsoft 365: Everyday Skills pathway: put an agenda in the invite, know where Teams recordings and transcripts end up and who can see them, write notes and actions that survive, and spot the meeting that should have been a message." lang: en --- Module 4 of StartCloud's Microsoft 365: Everyday Skills learning pathway, in five short units with a knowledge check: why four lines of agenda in the invite changes the meeting, where Teams recordings and transcripts are stored and therefore who can watch them later (the organiser's OneDrive for normal meetings, the team's SharePoint site for channel meetings), how to write notes and actions that survive the hour, and four simple questions for working out when a meeting should have been a message. # Meetings worth attending Module 4 · Meetings Unit 1 of 5 · about 2 min ## An agenda in the invite Look at your calendar for tomorrow. Most invites contain a title, a time, and a join link. That is a request for an hour of somebody's working life with no explanation of what the hour is for, which is why so many meetings spend the first ten minutes working out why they are happening. The fix is three or four lines typed into the invite before you send it. Not a formal agenda with roman numerals. **Just enough for someone to know what they are walking into and whether they are needed.** Four lines, and the meeting changes **Why we are meeting.** One sentence. Not the topic, the reason. "The Kwinana quote is due Friday and we cannot agree on the scope" tells people far more than "Kwinana catch-up". **What we need to decide or produce.** Name the thing that has to exist by the end. A decision, a number, a draft, a plan for the week. If you cannot name one, that is worth noticing before you send the invite, not after. **What to look at first.** Link the document, the quote, the dashboard. Two minutes of reading beforehand saves ten minutes of catching everyone up while four people wait. **Who is running it.** Usually you, and saying so is not bossy. It just means somebody has agreed to keep the thing moving and call time at the end. What an agenda does - People arrive having thought about it, instead of thinking out loud - Anyone who is not needed can say so, politely and early - You know when the meeting is finished, because you named the finish - The half hour that would have been forty-five minutes stays a half hour What an empty invite does - Everyone turns up cold and the first ten minutes are recap - Nobody can tell whether they are essential or decorative - The conversation wanders, because there is nothing to wander from - It ends because the hour ended, not because anything was settled Better still, put the agenda where the notes will be Teams meetings can carry a shared set of notes that you add to the invite before the day. Everyone can type in it at once, and it holds the agenda, the notes and the follow-up tasks in the same place. Start it a day early with your four lines in it, and by the time the meeting begins, half the thinking has already happened. We come back to this in unit three. StartCloud assistant Online G'day! 👋 I'm the StartCloud assistant. 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