It’s not hard to have an unproductive meeting. Bad meetings cause employees and managers alike frustration and anxiety, and the longer these inefficient meetings drone on, the longer your team is unable to get back to work and making progress on their projects.

If you want to frustrate your employees and hold long, agonizing meetings, be sure to follow these tips:

Learn how to use complicated meeting technology right at the start of the meeting.

If the collaboration technology you use for your meeting is too easy to use, or too user-friendly, it won’t take as long to get set up right before a meeting. So instead of starting on time, you’ll need to take a few minutes not talking about the purpose of the meeting to get everything configured and learn how to interact with your collaboration tools.

Don’t have a set agenda, just ramble on.

Outlines for a meeting’s agenda help keep a team too on track to end a meeting on time. Having an agenda make the whole conversation more focused and engaged. It’s better to just ramble on with your train of thought than keep yourself focused and on task during the whole meeting by having a reminder of the meeting’s goals.

Review previous conversations and add nothing new.

To have a bad meeting, it’s best to take a while to get to the point of your meeting. Reading over the last meeting’s notes is a great way to slow down the momentum of your team. That way they can hear what items are still on their to-do list that they could be doing right now instead of sitting in a meeting. If you don’t add any follow ups or additions to these notes, your team will feel like you’ve had a meeting just to remind people of what your last meeting was about.

Don’t make any decisions during the meeting.

A good meeting is all about discussing your options, gathering information and coming up with a solution or game plan. So to have a bad meeting, make sure that you never walk away with a clear sense of what you will be doing next. Your team won’t be sure how to quickly proceed with your plans until either your next email or meeting.

Good meetings are important to your organization. Don’t make the same mistakes that breed bad meetings. Plan ahead to save time, and use technology that is easy and quick to pick up do you can start on time.

Meetings help your team get on the same foot and figure out your goals. But don’t keep them too long, since it’s only when the meeting is done that your organization can start working to meet those goals.

The world is moving to the cloud. With cloud-computing programs like DropBox, Apple’s iCloud, and Google Drive, more and more individuals and businesses find that moving to a cloud service can solve several technological hurdles.

From a cost or hardware perspective, cloud services are a great aide to businesses. With these tools, companies no longer need to buy individual and expensive servers to store all of their important files and data.

Package plans from cloud services offer as much storage as a business could need, leaving your company without having to worry about server maintenance or hardware malfunctions. And with no in-office servers to maintain, you save money by not needing to hire out specialists when an issue arises.

Everyone in your office can connect easily to the cloud system of your company’s choice. Usually the only thing required is Internet access and logging in to the company account. No need to learn any complicated server setup to find the documents they need.

Cloud computing has walked hand in hand with an increase in business collaboration. Employees can access files from anywhere, more than one employee can access the server and file at the same time. Several cloud services, such as Google Drive, allows multiple people to work on a single file at the same time.

The days of a single person working on a document, saving it, emailing or printing it off for the next person to work on, can be safely put to rest. Now, all members of a project can access the individual files at the same time, working collaboratively in order to finish their tasks quickly and more efficiently. And without having to worry about opening or working on an outdated version of the document.

There are never enough hours in the day to get everything checked of your “to do” list. So how do you find ways to maximize the work you get done during business and not cut too many corners or start producing sub-par products and projects.

We’ve compiled several quick tips to help you cut time corners without reducing your productivity.

1. Avoid heavy multitasking

Multitasking is a great skill to have to balance all of your open projects, but take time to focus on a single project without distractions. This reduces the chance for errors that multitasking can cause when your brain is trying to solve 5 problems at once.

2. Prioritize your checklist frequently

Go down your “to-do” list and evaluate how much of a priority each individual item is and adjust accordingly. If something needs to be completed by a sooner deadline, make it a higher priority item even if it seems small enough that you could wait a little while.

3. Set a time to leave

If you keep telling yourself that you can just stay a few minutes later to finish a product, you will work with less urgency and efficiency than if you have a hard deadline time in which to get your items finished for the day.

4. Don’t hesitate to delegate

If part of a project is not your forte, and someone else on your team can finish that piece in a faster, more efficient timeframe, do not be ashamed to ask for assistance. Don’t waste previous time flaying about learning how to do an item that your team members could help you with or teach you about.

5. Eliminate distractions

If you are easily distracted, set down your phone or close browser tabs you no longer need. Distractions can start off taking just a few seconds, but it can break your concentration away from your tasks long enough to make picking things back up again much harder.

6. Plan your days in advance

Start your day by writing up the day’s task list. After you adjust for priorities and deadlines, you will know exactly what you need to focus on for the day, setting the rest aside until you get to the next day.

7. Work in chunks

Brain breaks are necessary to prevent tiring yourself out. Find the optimal amount of time you can work on a single project before you start to lose focus. Take short 5 minute breaks to stretch your legs, refill your coffee cup, and prepare for the next stretch of productivity.

Information is meant to be more than just taken in; information is meant to be used.

Educators have used projects to help students not only retain the information in a certain lesson, but also as a way for students to actively show their understanding of a topic. Long term projects that require research increase a student’s knowledge of a subject to a much deeper level.

Projects have a lot of appeal as well for actively engaging all types of learners, especially more hands on and visual learners. And with the growth of interactive technology in the classroom, you can turn your ordinary lecture lessons into class-wide interactive projects.

Lectures are useful when you have a lot of material to cover, but we understand that temptation to start dozing off. Today’s students respond better and retain more information when that information is broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

By inserting moments for your students to come up and point out or interact directly with the board, it keeps the pace of your lesson moving along nicely. Breaking up the traditional routine will be something that your students remember and it can also keep your lessons from becoming too long for their attention span.

Instead of having worksheets to hand out after a short lesson, try giving your students small projects that they can use their phones, if they have them, or school computers or tablets to complete. Take your normal assignments and find a way to make them digital. Here are a few ideas.

• Turn a simple PowerPoint presentation into a short video about the subject that students must work together to create.
• Have students use social media to reach out to experts and government officials to help them answer questions for a worksheet.
• Pair up with another class in a different school to set up a Skype pen pal or homework help system.
• Use collaborative software, like Google’s Drive and Docs, for students to work together to write a report.
• Research and find apps that focus on a particular course subject that corresponds with your lessons for your kids to play with.