Keeping Focus in Project Meetings

Have you ever had the experience in project meetings where, when your task list is projected on a screen, you get three or four people talking about a particular task, possibly heatedly, only to find that they are really talking about different tasks?

In this post I’ll describe a simple approach to keeping focus on a single task to limit these kind of wandering, often time consuming discussions.

The trick I discovered is to highlight the specific task we are supposed to be discussing in the meeting. I establish a rule for status meetings that the only topic of discussion is the item highlighted, or items which have dependencies related to the highlighted task.

The image to the right shows what this looks like in Excel. I use Excel here because it remains the most popular project management tool in use today. I have abandoned MS Project in several projects in favor of Excel because I can usually do most of what I need in Excel, and while few people have a licensed copy of Project, it seems like everyone has Excel, making the sharing of project plans easy. There are disadvantages to this, namely the single source of truth problem, but I digress, I’m talking about keeping focus here.

The blue line in the image is the highlighted line. The line moves up or down as you move the input focus from cell to cell.

To do this, create a very short macro on the worksheet. It has to be attached to the worksheet, not a module. Then set a conditional format on the sheet.

Code for macro is shown below.

Now set up a conditional format for the schedule. You want to use the “Use a formula to determine which cells to format” option, and in the formula text box, type:

Now, as the cursor moves around the worksheet, the line the cursor is on will be highlighted. This works wonders in terms of minimizing side conversations and keeping focus on the goal, effectively utilizing everyone’s time. I’ve had new project managers work for me who initially resist doing this because they are confident they don’t need such tricks. After the first couple of project meetings, they inevitably end up in my office asking for help setting this up.

While Excel is functional for managing projects, my favorite tool is Smartsheet. Smartsheet in many ways looks and acts like a spreadsheet, which is something most people are comfortable with. At the same time, it is a real project management tool that understands dependencies, facilitates resource tracking, and includes common project management capabilities such as Kanban board and Gantt chart views.

Smartsheet highlights the row the mouse cursor is on, though the highlight is very dim, as can maybe be seen in the screen shot at the right. It helps, but the highlight doesn’t relate to the current input focus, and is pretty hard to see, particularly when projecting on a screen in a brightly lit room. The solution I came up with, shown as the yellow highlight in this image, is to add a checkbox column called “Select” and then set a conditional format which highlights the entire row. It is a bit more of a pain than the Excel solution because you need to specifically check the box to highlight the line, then uncheck the box it before moving on to remove the highlight, but the effort is relatively small compared to the benefit of keeping focus, and the ability to use a tool specifically designed for project management.

One other related note on what I find works really well in project meetings: If a conversation on a highlighted item starts, and is resolved in less than 2 minutes, I allow it to continue. If it looks like the discussion will take more than 2 minutes, I interrupt the discussion, add a task for that (parked) discussion with a due date to report on the outcome scheduled for the next project meeting. In this case, the highlight keeps the meeting focused, while still enabling facilitation of parked discussions.