Demo: Toastmasters Agenda Time Planner - WordPress for Toastmasters*

The members of your club appreciate it when you have a well-organized agenda that allows you to pack a lot into your meetings — and still finish on time. In addition to having a standard meeting agenda that you follow most weeks, you will have occasional needs to adjust for longer speeches or special activities.

The WordPress for Toastmasters software allows you to assign time to meeting roles and activities, and the new Agenda Time Planner tool allows meeting organizers to make adjustments to that schedule more quickly and easily. It’s shown fast-forward below and demoed in more detail in my video.

An example of when you would use this tool is when a member needs to give a speech that is longer than the standard 7 minutes, and you need to cut back on the time assigned for Table Topics or other activities.

The Agenda Time Planner is an interactive worksheet that shows you the effect of adding or subtracting time on different parts of your agenda. It’s available to meeting leaders such as the Toastmaster of the Day who may not have the website editing rights necessary to edit the underlying document. In addition to helping you produce an agenda that looks well organized, the goal is to help you be more organized heading into a meeting.

A more thorough overhaul of the agenda, or changes to the template used as the basis for your regular meetings, still requires editing rights. But even those with the required editing rights may find that the planner helps with some tasks.

Agenda Time Planner Instructions

The Agenda Time Planner is one of the tools you can access from the menu that appears at the top of every agenda.

The allowed times in minutes are listed next to each role or activity. Type in a new number or use the up/down arrows to make adjustments. You will see the effect of your changes instantly.

When done, click Update Times to save your changes. After a few seconds you should see a confirmation that your changes have been saved, along with links allowing you to preview the agenda, return to the signup form, or (if you have editing rights) open the document in the WordPress editor.

If you have editing rights and are working with the standard template for your meetings, you will also see the prompt to Create / Update events based on the template.