My Stack, My Rules: The 120-Second Post-Meeting Hack

You hit “End Meeting.” The video window shrinks into oblivion. 

If you’re like a lot of corporate professionals, you might immediately move onto the next item on your to-do list without a moment’s pause. Mentally you’ve already checked off the item and have switched your energy and focus to the next priority.

Jennifer Cheung, Head of Learning & Performance at NextGen, who holds a background in organisational psychology, thinks that approach misses the most valuable part of the entire interaction.

Her productivity stack isn’t built around complex software or automated calendar rules. It’s a 120-second post-meeting debrief that sharpens how she listens, coaches and understands team dynamics.

Looking Between the Words

When analysing how a session went, most people focus purely on content: Did we cover all the slides? Did we finish on time?

• Jennifer suggests that surface-level smoothness can actually hide critical information.”Most people assume a good meeting just means the agenda was covered,” she explains.”They miss that the real value often sits in the moments between the words; a room that agrees a little too quickly or a meeting that wraps early with no real pushback.”

A room full of nodding heads can easily look like great alignment. But as she points out, that frictionless environment is often what Patrick Lencioni calls artificial harmony (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass, 2002); disagreement that didn’t get spoken, just postponed. Catching those subtle moments allows her to tune in to what a team or individual is actually feeling, rather than just what they are saying out loud.

Compressing the Learning Cycle

To continuously improve her coaching and facilitation, she compresses Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle into a one-to-two-minute debrief, either as a quick mental check or a brief note to herself, immediately after any session she leads.

She walks through three simple prompts:

• 1. What actually happened? — Objective facts of the interaction
• 2. What do I make of it? — Underlying team dynamics and unspoken signals
• 3. What would I do differently next time? — Immediate adjustment

What makes this habit so effective for personal growth is that she audits her own behaviour just as closely as the coachee’s content. In coaching sessions, she pays attention to her own listening habits, noticing the subtle moments where she instinctually wants to give advice instead of applying Stephen Covey’s principle: seek first to understand.

Pattern Matching vs. Pattern Breaking

Whether you are facilitating a workshop, running a 1-on-1, or coaching a team member through a challenge, becoming better at your job isn’t about adding more tools to your calendar, it’s about processing the subtle data right in front of you.

“Taking a minute to reflect costs almost nothing in the moment,” she says. “But it’s the difference between repeating a pattern and actually changing it.”

Try Her Stack Today:

The next time you finish a call, ask yourself:

1. What didn’t get said in that meeting?
2. Where did I rush to react instead of listen?
3. What is one thing I’ll tweak the next time I lead?

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