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How To 'Do' Better Meetings

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Yes, meetings. The bane of every professional's life! They say the secret to a good meeting is to have a clear agenda, shared in advance, and with outcomes in mind. In reality though it's hard to do: People arrive late, and even if you sent out an email beforehand, there's no guarantee anyone's read it.

That's where Do comes in. It's a new SaaS tool to manage your meetings, set agendas, create notes in real-time, distribute minutes at the end, and track outcomes and action items. I've been struggling along without this for years, and I was lucky enough to test it pre-launch. It's awesome.

Before now the best I came up with was putting notes in the calendar invite, and then using a Google Doc during the meeting to record the minutes and action items. But, although it worked, it was clunky.

Do offers an integration with the calendar inside Google Apps. So every one of my appointments now has a link to Do. I click that, and it takes me into the scratchpad for that meeting. Here anyone attending the meeting can add to the agenda, update notes during the meeting, or record action items. Those action items can be assigned to other people, and they can update it in real time as well. At the end of the meeting Do automatically emails all attendees the output of the meeting, along with your action items highlighted. At the start of the day it sends you a summary of your upcoming meetings too. It's dealing with the pain you experience before, during and after meetings! It also integrates with Evernote, which I think is a smart move as I think a lot of people have been using that to solve meeting pain until this came along.

One of the impressive things about Do is its pedigree. It's got a fantastic name, thank to Salesforce being a minority investor in the startup. Do.com was used for years by the Salesforce-owned product of the same name. That was a (rather good) project management application which unfortunately Salesforce decided to shut down. With a killer domain name something had to be done, so Salesforce partnered with SherpaFoundry, a strategic advisory firm led by Tina Sharkey, connected to SherpaVentures, which was founded by well-known investors Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford in 2013. With a great domain name they needed a great team to do something with it, and so it was a natural pairing for former Yammer product manager Jason Shah. Jason is pretty well known for his udemy course, "How To Get a Job As a Product Manager".

Do has a great name, beautiful design and a product that's definitely helping to solve a big problem. One of the clever things they know is that the biggest barrier to the adoption of productivity tools is that difficulty of changing user behaviour. I really think they have a good chance of success, as it's easy to use, and the deep calendar integration means there's little the user has to do. They're focusing on mid to large sized companies using Google Apps for the moment, and accepting sign ups for their beta as of today.

One last thing that caught my eye, and gave me a chuckle: the company name behind Do is "ReDo, Inc." A nice little nod to this domain name being re-born!