Creatively Planning Creative Meetings

If you work in an environment that is creative, many things come to mind when someone says creative meeting. For me there are some good things, and some bad things that come to my mind. What I’ve learned over the past thought is that there are things you can do to help your creative meetings be more productive. So many times creative meetings never go anywhere due to many factors. If you’re like me, walking out of a meeting with the feeling that nothing got accomplished absolutely sucks. It’s horrible. So here are a few things that you can do when scheduling and preparing for your meetings to boost productivity.

1. Time of Week – For me Mondays are horrible! I’m tired from the weekend so I have no energy and my mind feels very clogged. So for us here at Lifepoint, creative meetings and Mondays do not mix at all. I use Mondays for my more monotonous and simple tasks and save creativity for the other days.

2. Time of Day – Pick a time of the day when you feel most energized and awake. If you’re a morning person then go for it! If you’re not, don’t dare try and force something that’s not there. For me after lunch, all I want to do is take a nap. I’m not very creative. Earlier in the morning works for me.

3. Have toys – I’ve said this before but have toys in these meetings. Sometimes a little play helps spark ideas. (Go to Toys-R-Us and get legos, nerf guns, balls, and anything else you can throw.)

3. Something to organize Ideas – Grab yourself a huge dry erase board or some type of creative board. We use a creative board.  It’s basically a foldable foam board covered in black cloth. That way we can organize our ideas by categories using different colored index cards and pin them on the board. I prefer this because it’s easier to move around and change things as we go.

4. Notepad – We have an unwritten rule at Lifepoint that you’re not allowed to show up at any meeting with out a pad and pen. If you do, it shows that you’re not prepared. In creative meetings you have to have something to be able to capture ideas as well as action items. Action items are simply things that need doing after leaving the meeting. Behance has some great articles on this here. I use their Action Book that works great at keeping me organized.