For most of us, meetings are the bane of office life. Ideally face-to-face meetings are a perfect time for teams to bring up ideas, build consensus, and make decisions that move projects forward, but, in reality, a lot of what happens in meetings is not relevant or useful.

So we created Dropbox Paper, a simple, a powerful tool for teams to meet with. With Paper, your team has one central place to create and find the info they need, including meeting notes and resources. Here are three simple ways you can use Paper to run a tight, efficient—and valuable—meeting.

Set up your meeting for success

Elon Musk is known to conduct famously efficient meetings. These start with the basic requirement that everyone comes prepared and ready for prime time. Paper is a simple way to make sure everyone is on the same page even before they’re in the same room. Start by creating a meeting doc with key details at the top: agenda, meeting date, attendee names. 

Tip: Type in “/date” or “/datetime” (followed by a space). Paper automatically fills in the current date and time.

If you have existing Paper docs or resources with relevant background info, just add links to into the document to get your team up to speed quickly. Share the doc in advance of your meeting to provide context for the discussion. If you use Google Calendar for work, you can integrate it with Paper to save yourself some typing. One click creates a template that’s auto-populated with your subject, date, attendees, and your agenda.

Make meeting notes memorable

Tired of collating stickies or trying to recreate a brilliant sketch digitally? Our Paper app for iOS and Android can snap a quick picture of whiteboards and stickies. Just click the camera icon that appears in your doc on the app, and Paper will automatically place your photo in your meeting notes. Add links of related Dropbox files and images to add more context or provide proof points and examples. Or perhaps add high-fidelity mock-ups and prototypes with the new InVision plug-in for Paper. 

Close the meeting with clear outcomes

World-changing ideas won’t get off the ground without concrete next steps. Tackle the biggest decisions and tasks from your meeting by using Paper’s task list feature. It makes ticking off big and small action points easy and helps you keep track of every item. To quickly create checkboxes, type square brackets (“[ ]”) followed by a space.

You can assign tasks simply by mentioning someone with the @ sign, and get notifications when the task is complete. With the sharing feature, you can send the doc to all stakeholders—including those who couldn’t attend. That way, the entire team knows what was discussed, what was decided, and who owns the action items.

A unified focus point across the team can lead to more efficient meetings, making a measurable difference in your team’s productivity. By bringing together content and collaborators in one place, Paper can help you simplify what happens before, during, and after, so you can keep projects powering along. Try Paper for your next team meeting.

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