These days I find myself in a fair amount of meetings. It seems like relatively common sense on how meetings should be run, but I’m amazed at the inefficiency of how most meetings are conducted.

Some simple guidelines to making meetings more effective and participants happier:

-Confirm the meeting time, date and location the day before the meeting. In the days of electronic calendars, smartphones and PDAs, we still need simple reminders. There’s nothing that makes the effectiveness of a meeting worse than a key participant not showing up.

-Start on time. No exceptions. Just start. Sooner or later the participants will get the message that they have to be on time for future meetings.

-Communicate the meeting’s objective. “This is what we need to accomplish with this meeting.”

-Agenda. List the items that need to be discussed. This keeps meetings from getting off topic (and becoming ineffective).

-Allocate time so you can end on time. Let participants know from the beginning that the meeting will start at 9 and end at 10. But make sure you allocate time per agenda item so that you can end the meeting on time. If you spend 10 minutes on 8 items, then you obviously won’t make the hour timeline.

If you do these five simple tasks, you’ll be a meeting-running-super-star.

**Update, just saw this post from 37Signals / Ricardo Selma book, and noted that we had almost the identical points. Ricardo puts it in slightly different terms-good stuff.