13 cool tools that will help improve virtual meeting productivity

People love to hate on meetings, but the truth we really just dislike meetings that waste our time and don’t move us closer to some objective.

And when we move them online, a poor meeting is just a poor meeting online.

The good news is that there is a growing host of tools that’ll help you improve meetings one slice at a time. 

Before the meeting

  • MeetingBird tackles the ever-present challenge of coordinating meetings. This isn’t a new problem or solution, but syncing calendars from multiple accounts and/or integrating with other apps? That’s useful.
  • ZmURL adds registration pages and additional security to your Zoom meetings. 

Around and in the meeting

  • Navigator is designed for remote meetings, putting agendas, notes, action items, and even the attendance link in one spot – and organizes it all by topic. 
  • Jottie centralizes and organizes notes, to-do lists (and presumably, therefore, decision-making), and assigning those action items.
  • Range integrates with Slack and keeps your team updated on each other’s progress by manage “check ins” or “stand ups” 
  • RateTheMeeting helps you measure – and presumably improve – meetings by gathering data and powering insights for improvement.
  • HUGO helps you take notes in a collaborative, shareable, and findable way – integrated with your calendar and other apps.
  • Tooqan facilitates transparency and (hopefully) cultural improvement by gathering honest feedback and serving up analytics.

Instead of the meeting

  • Loom seeks to replace email and meetings with recorded videos (screen, voice, and camera) in an asynchronous messaging (and replying) format.
  • Veed functions similarly to Loom, but adds video editing and titling (and might be more useful if you also want to create videos for social media)

Repurposing meeting assets

  • MyVIDEO.rip will help you turn your meeting recording into transcripts, audio-only files, and captions.

Have fun…or bail out!

  • Need to randomly make a choice? Plug your ideas into Wheel Decide and give it a whirl.
  • Finally, for those times when you need an excuse to get out, Callback will fake a call to you. Not that I’ve ever done that, but…

The bottom line

If we’re honest, tools alone don’t solve the issue of poor meetings (it’s a people issue, right?). But they can be particularly useful in nudging behavior in a direction. And who doesn’t need to keep working on productivity?

Finally, credit where credit’s due, some of the ideas here came from ProductHunt (a site I love to keep the ideas flowing!). Check ‘em out.

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