I tend to find in person meetings good for general discussion but very inefficient for anything where productivity and getting actual work done is concerned. I’ll usually make note of an action item if I need to, during the meeting, but otherwise I won’t take notes or have anything open in front of me.

For productive meetings, I find a Skype call (or Google Hangout) with a shared Google Doc open works really well.

We have more or less standardised our meetings process now and have two main templates we include in all project documents.

General meeting
Date start time – end time
People present (virtually)
Notes
* Discussion point 1
* Discussion point 2

Progress meeting
Date start time – end time
People present (virtually)
Notes
* What did you do since last meeting?
* Person’s name – feedback
* What is next on your list?
* Person’s name – feedback
* Are there any impediments in your way?
* Person’s name – feedback
* General Comments
* Person’s name – feedback

We use the Google doc to draft the agenda and everyone adds their notes in the same document. Sometimes one person will take the lead in making notes during the discussion. What’s great about this is that all of our notes are contextualised around the agenda and everyone can see the same notes. We can include links in the notes or screenshots and the agenda transitions into meeting minutes and becomes a usable reference.

Any further action items such as creating new BitBucket/GitHub issue can happen after the meeting. based on the notes.

The meeting document becomes a central reference for the project and if someone can’t make a meeting, she/he can review the meeting document to catch up on what was discussed. We sometimes also have text only meetings where we set up the agenda and everyone gives their feedback in the Google document.

Implementing this approach has been a huge time saver for us and helped us keep meetings more focused.