How I Use Prysm to Simplify Team Meetings

Like most of us at Prysm, I'm passionate about our platform, and I use it every day. After a while, it's hard to imagine conducting certain activities — such as my biweekly team meetings — without it. 

Before I came to Prysm, organizing status meetings went something like this:

1. Search through my email “sent” items and dig up the previous meeting’s agenda and notes to cull topics for the next meeting. 
2. Send a reminder to my team to email me their status updates and hot topics. Then comb through my email inbox right before the meeting, adding their content to my agenda. 
3. Email the agenda to the team and print it out to distribute at the meeting, so that everyone can see it while we look at other content on the screen.
4. Assign someone to take notes and distribute them after the meeting.

 In contrast, here's how I use Prysm to accomplish these tasks much more easily, with better outcomes:

1.  I have a Prysm project dedicated to biweekly team status. (If you haven't yet used the Prysm Application Suite, think of a “project” as a three-ring binder, filled with tabbed sections called “work spaces”.)
2. Duplicate the previous meeting’s workspace, taking all thought out of meeting setup. The top of the workspace is divided into a few different sections: “Agenda,” “Discussion Notes,” and “For Future Meetings.” I am responsible for updating the upper half of the workspace.
3. The bottom of the workspace has one sticky note for each member of my team. Before the meeting, each team member populates their sticky note with status items and topics they'd like to cover in the meeting. (Goodbye unnecessary email threads.)

Once the meeting starts, everyone signs in to Prysm from their laptop or mobile device and opens up the shared project. Once in, the remote participants can see everything that happens, as it happens. They can also create and interact with the content on the screen, as well.

In the “Agenda” section, I list the issues and topics we’ll be covering in the meeting. As the conversation unfolds, those who aren’t speaking take turns updating the “Discussion Notes” section of the workspace.  As we go through the meeting, we can table items that require follow up, listing them in the “For Future Meetings” section. 

The best part of running meetings with Prysm is that the project and work spaces don’t disappear after the meeting is over. So instead of having to be constantly searching through my email to remember what we talked about and decided during past meetings, I just open up the project and refer to the workspace for the date of the meeting in question. Any team member can do the same. In this way, we're always moving forward, instead of covering the same ground, ad infinitum.

After having experienced this new way to work, I don't know how I'd ever go back to the old, inefficient way. If you'd like to share tips on using Prysm to make work easier, leave a comment below.