Meeting agenda maker, with the times worked out.

A meeting agenda is a short plan for a meeting: why you are meeting, who is there, and the topics to cover in order, each with a person and an amount of time. This free meeting agenda maker lets you fill in those parts, works out the start time of every topic, adds up the total, and gives you a clean PDF or plain text to send. It runs in your browser, so you can use it for a one-off meeting or every week.

How to make a meeting agenda

1. Pick Start from an example if you want a head start (a weekly team meeting, a project kickoff, a one-to-one or a committee meeting), or type your own.
2. Under The meeting, give the Meeting title, the Date and the Start time. Add a Location or link, a Facilitator and a Note-taker if you have them.
3. Write the Purpose in a sentence or two, and list the Attendees, one per line.
4. Under Topics, type each topic, who leads it and how many Minutes it gets. Use the arrow buttons to move a topic up or down, and the cross to remove it. Click + Add a topic for another row.
5. Type a Planned length (minutes) if the meeting has a fixed slot. The page then tells you if the topics fit.
6. Click Download PDF to save the file, or Copy as text to paste the agenda into an email or a document.

What a good agenda includes

• A purpose. One or two sentences on what the meeting should achieve. If you cannot write it, you may not need the meeting.
• Topics in a sensible order. Put the topic that needs a decision early, while people are fresh, and leave the quick updates for later.
• An owner for each topic. A topic with a name beside it gets prepared. A topic with no name often gets skipped.
• Time for each topic. A number of minutes makes people say what matters first.
• What to read or bring. Put it under Before the meeting and send the agenda early enough for people to do it.
• A place for actions. The empty table at the end of the PDF is for decisions and who does what by when.

How the times are worked out

The first topic starts at the start time. Every next topic starts when the one before it ends, so its start time is the previous start time plus the previous minutes. The total is all the minutes added together, and the end time is the start time plus the total. Here is a one hour weekly meeting that starts at 9:00 AM.

If you type a planned length of 45 minutes for this agenda, the page says it is over by 15 minutes, because 60 minus 45 is 15. That is the moment to cut a topic, not halfway through the meeting. If the planned length is 75, it says 15 minutes are spare. A few spare minutes are useful, because meetings rarely run exactly to plan.

Agendas for different kinds of meeting

Common problems

• Too many topics. If the minutes add up to more than the slot, something has to go. Move it to the next meeting or handle it by message.
• No time for the last topic. The actions and close often get squeezed. Give them their own line on the agenda so they keep their minutes.
• One person talks for the whole slot. Say in the Notes column what you want from the topic, such as "decide" or "share one update each". It keeps the talk on the goal.
• Nobody reads the agenda. Keep it to one page, send it a day ahead and put the one thing to read in Before the meeting.

Copy the agenda into Word or a spreadsheet

Copy as text gives the details as lines and the topics as tab-separated rows with the headings Time, Topic, Owner and Minutes. Paste them into a spreadsheet and each part lands in its own cell. In Word, paste the lines and use Convert Text to Table with tabs as the separator. For a live copy that people can edit together, paste it into a shared document.

After the meeting, write down what was decided with Meeting notes, or draw the follow-up plan as a mind map. If the meeting is about a process that keeps going wrong, write the steps down with the SOP template builder.