Web Worker Daily

Meetings, meetings, phooey. Even if you’ve already taken some of the sting out of meetings by using a good online meeting tool, you can take more sting out of them with free and nearly free tools for keeping your get-togethers efficient. In this post, I’ll round up three of my favorites.

Do you ever get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to simply get an online meeting scheduled? You often have to send out multiple e-mails, keep track of who flaked out and didn’t even answer your meeting proposal, and inevitably right after attendees one through 19 confirm the same time as available, attendee 20 can’t do it.

If you run into these problems, definitely try ikordo. The video on the home page of the ikordo site makes very clear what the application does. It negotiates an open meeting time for all proposed participants through automated e-mails, keeps track of responses to proposals, sends reminders in advance of a meeting (e-mails or text messages), and even tracks contacts from the various meetings you hold. If you don’t feel comfortable handing the whole meeting setup process over to an application, you can always jump in and check on what stage of the process ikordo is in. It’s free.

Effective Meetings from Simple Business Tools is a good application to pop up and work with while you’re planning a meeting, and during a meeting. It walks you through steps to set up a meeting agenda, captures and circulates points to come out of a meeting, and prompts you to avoid time wasting. I’m surprised there aren’t more applications like this one, designed to be savvy meeting sidekicks. Among other benefits, the application simply helps make sure that you don’t forget to cover key points. It’s free to try, but $39.95 if you like it.

Web workers now have a huge number of choices when it comes to free ways to do online meetings, even if there are lots of attendees, and Anne Zelenka on this blog did a roundup of nine of them recently. From her list, if you don’t already use an online meeting tool, one of my favorite applications is Yugma. Anne also gave it a recommendation. It’s very slick, totally free, and Windows, Mac and Linux folks can use it.

Starting and joining sessions with Yugma is as quick and easy as launching instant messaging sessions. You can share your desktop with other attendees, and they can share theirs with you. Most people who try Yugma instantly like it.

Do you have any good tips on tools for more effective meetings?