Chicago Tribune (Sunday)

4 great, free under-the-radar tools for more manageable meetings

- SOURCE: Doug Aamoth, Fast Company

Until we master the mysterious art of telepathy, which seems a long way off, we’re stuck with meetings. Fortunatel­y, there are plenty of free tools that can take the sting out of scheduling, coming up with agendas, note-taking and more.

Simple scheduling with YouCanBook.me

YouCanBook.me takes the pain out of figuring out a time to connect by hooking into your calendar and serving up a landing page that your

coworkers, clients or customers can use to schedule a meeting with you.

The service integrates with Google or Microsoft accounts, features automatic time-zone detection, automatica­lly creates links for Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams.

Awesome agenda templates from Hyperconte­xt

If you’re running a meeting, coming up with an agenda can be more work than the meeting itself. Hyperconte­xt’s free meeting agenda templates do all the heavy lifting for you. There are more than 90 available, handily categorize­d based on the type of meeting you’re having. Templates are available for download in

Word, Excel and PDF formats.

Automated meeting minutes with Sembly

Can you take notes? Those might be the four worst words in all of meeting-dom. Thankfully, it’s 2022 and we have a nice selection of nonhuman note-takers at our disposal. Simply invite Sembly to your next meeting — it integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and Webex — and it’ll show up, record the meeting, and provide well-organized notes once the call has ended.

Video calls with Jitsi Meet Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, oh my. If you’re looking to connect a disparate group of meeting attendees without figuring out who’s using which platform, look no further than Jitsi Meet. Head over to the site, create your own unique meeting URL, and send it out to the group. Once everyone’s connected, you’ve got unlimited free meeting time for up to 100 participan­ts.

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