How to avoid meeting distractions?
I’ll share a technique on how to deal issues that are unrelated to the meeting and come up during discussion.
These issue often go in a tangent and tend to take away the focus of your conversation. I’ll provided you a simple tip that is almost effortless to implement: the meeting parking lot.
Whenever a new unrelated topic comes up during one of your meeting, acknowledge the existence of the topic and open a parking lot where these items will be discussed at the end of the meeting.
Before you finish your meeting, take a look at the list in your parking lot, talk about the items or reassign them to the right people, as you think appropriate.
Test this technique yourself in your next meeting: create a parking lot and keep your meeting focus on the main topics of discussion.