Meeting Schedule Template

Any meeting, be it a team update, a stakeholder review or a full-fledged conference, needs a bit of planning and a good meeting schedule. How many times have you attended a meeting that went on for too long, got sidetracked, or ended without reaching a useful conclusion? How many times did you leave at the end of a meeting thinking “This could have been an email”?

With an effective meeting schedule template in place, the likelihood of this happening will be much smaller.

How exactly can a meeting schedule or agenda help you?

Designed correctly, a meeting agenda will play a critical role in the success of the session. Here’s why:

• It determines objectives. An effective meeting calendar template, whether it’s for a quick check-in, a stakeholder gathering or a conference, sets clear objectives and allows participants to have a good understanding of the “What” and the “Why” of the session prior to its start.
• It sets expectations. A clear meeting schedule template or agenda will also help set expectations and clarify responsibilities both before the session starts and after it’s ended, too.
• It helps everyone stay on track. A good meeting agenda template sets the pace of the session, helps participants to stay focused and avoid distractions, and can act as a time management tool, preventing unproductive meetings. If designed as a visual timeline, it will be very easy to read at first glance and can be used successfully during the meeting to keep everyone on track.
• Acts as a reference point. Days or weeks after an important meeting, it might be difficult to remember exactly what was discussed. With a meeting schedule to look back on, especially if it’s updated to include short notes of the decisions taken or key conclusions, you will have a clear reference point to use as a refresher.

How do you prepare a meeting schedule?

Whether you’re planning a short, one-hour team update or are looking for a conference schedule template for events that last multiple days, you can use these steps to create your meeting schedule:

1. Identify the meeting’s goals. When your objectives are clear, you can make sure every task or discussion topic you want to cover is related to your meeting’s main goal.
2. List your meeting’s topics as tasks or questions. This will help you be specific and avoid agenda items that will not lead anywhere. Keeping everything clear and concise will also make sure your meeting or conference will stay on schedule.
3. Estimate realistic times for each item included in your meeting schedule template. Take into account the time it will take to introduce a topic, answer any questions, evaluate possible solutions, and so on. For multi-day meeting calendars, don’t forget to consider break times as well.
4. Identify discussion leaders. If there will be multiple speakers, write down who will be leading each topic. This will help the meeting or conference run smoothly and will ensure everyone knows their responsibilities and when they’re due to talk.
5. Make a timeline. A visual schedule similar to the meeting agenda template at the top of this page will be much easier to track both by you and by the rest of the participants, not to mention that it can also add a touch of elegance to your schedule.

Use our meeting schedule template for your next agenda

Our free meeting schedule template was designed to assist you with the scheduling and organization of a meeting agenda or itinerary. The timeline template was built as a native PowerPoint slide, making it is easy to communicate your agenda to colleagues, team members, guests, presenters, and other meeting participants.

The meeting agenda example was created as a visual timeline to provide business professionals and their audiences with a clear, easy-to-follow graphic of all the planned activities. The layout is well suited for visualizing meeting appointments that may have conflicts, or which may overlap with other scheduled events. This meeting calendar template was created to provide a high-level view of a multi-day conference but can be used for planning meetings that span less than a day or even less than an hour.

Save time with the meeting schedule template

Creating a visual meeting timeline for client reviews, seminars, training sessions, conferences, workshops or other events can be time-consuming. Our free conference agenda template is a tool to help expedite the job of making a clear, accurate meeting chart in just a few clicks. You can download the template for free and manually edit it directly in PowerPoint, or you can customize and update it effortlessly with the Office Timeline meeting schedule maker. Office Timeline is a PowerPoint add-in that enables professionals to create beautiful timelines and other scheduling visuals instantly. You can use the free version to get started quickly or the more advanced Pro+ Edition to make powerful visuals that help your meetings stand out.

The meeting schedule template is easily customizable using the PowerPoint add-in’s visual drag & drop editor, so updating the timeline to accommodate any changes that occur over the course of planning a meeting – or even during the meeting - can be done surprisingly fast. Office Timeline allows you to immediately change the meeting calendar template as plans move or as the agenda shifts. It also integrates with Microsoft Excel, so any conference or meeting schedules created in Excel can be imported into PowerPoint and quickly updated with a click of a button when the Excel data changes.

Use this schedule template to create a high-level overview of your meeting agenda. It can be printed or emailed to the attendees and speakers of your meeting as a way to clearly set the daily timetable. Once customized and styled to fit your preferences, the template can be reused for any future meetings where you might want to use a visual timeline.