Do you find meeting virtually to be more a helpful tool in your scheduling toolkit?

Are you looking for some productivity tips to help you hold more productive meetings?

Virtual meetings have become a way of life over the past several years.

Even if you’ve attended countless virtual meetings, you may want to tighten up the framework of your meetings so they run smoothly and efficiently.

The key is to reframe your approach toward virtual meeting management.

Here are six tips to help you better manage virtual meetings of all kinds.

Be prompt.

Even though they’re not held in person, virtual meetings are still meetings and should be treated as such.

Plan to arrive on time. In fact, arriving promptly to digital meetings is a great place to practice punctuality because the pressure of travel is removed.

If you’re the meeting organizer, arrive a few minutes early to set up, test equipment, and welcome attendees.

If you’re an attendee, log in a few minutes early to get yourself situated, test your equipment, and be mindfully present.

Make a virtual meeting checklist.

The idea here is to create a standardized virtual meeting experience for yourself so you’ll know exactly how to prepare for each and every meeting.

Focus on preparing items in your immediate digital and physical environment.

Some ideas include checking there’s adequate lighting, ensuring mice, keyboards, microphones, and earbuds are charged and available.

Additional ideas include removing any distracting items from the background or setting up your green screen or virtual background, and logging out of unnecessary apps.

You can set your phone to vibrate or silence, grab a glass of water, gather any necessary materials, grab a notepad and a pen, and quickly check your appearance in a mirror or test video.

You can also tailor your checklist to include requirements for different meetings, such as team, client, vendor, and 1:1 meetings.

Create an agenda.

If you’re running a meeting virtually, there’s no reason not to create an agenda. The process of creating an agenda will help you to better organize your thoughts.

At a bare minimum, be sure to include the name of your meeting, date, time, attendees, and items to be discussed or presented.

Depending on your meeting, you may want to send the agenda out in advance for review and comment by meeting attendees.

And it’s a good idea to create agendas for 1:1 meetings as they can help the meeting flow naturally from one topic of discussion to another.

Track time using a wall clock or wristwatch.

Track the passage of time for digital meetings by using a separate analog timekeeping device.

This approach is practical because it forces you to pay attention to the passage of time.

You can use a large wall clock, a small desktop clock, a wristwatch, or even an hourglass.

If you don’t want to purchase a separate analog device, you can use a digital device such as a tablet or a phone, and set it to display an analog clock face.

Plan for transition time.

Attending meetings requires a shift in our mindset. Even if you plan to schedule several meetings in succession, it’s a good idea to add a few minutes worth of transition time to your meeting schedule.

Do your best to schedule a short 15-minute break between meetings to gather your thoughts.

For those times when you are unable to schedule a full break for yourself, add some variety to your work environment to signal the change from one virtual gathering to another.

Stand up or sit down, do some light stretching, look out the window, close your eyes for a moment, or take a deep breath.

You can also schedule this time for yourself to help you transition between different types of work, such as meeting with a client, to doing planning work by yourself.

Do a quick meeting recap.

If you want to conduct a brief review of your meeting, do so immediately.

Information will still be fresh in your mind and you’ll be better able to focus before you become occupied with other work.

You can either type up a short email recap, jot down some longhand notes, or do an audio recording to summarize the key points of the meeting as well as the next steps.

Use your meeting notes and agenda to help clarify or fill in any gaps as necessary.

How about you? Which of these tips are you going to follow for your next virtual meeting. Join the conversation and leave a comment below!

This post originally appeared on Inc.com.