When you feel held captive by your calendar, it’s time to reevaluate. You can make your calendar work for you by adopting these 4 strategies.
Meetings
How to Maximize Remote Meetings
Bad Zoom meetings can be the most frustrating part of remote work, but they don’t have to be. Here’s how to have better remote meetings.
The Secret to Great Meetings: Preparation
Meetings are frustrating for all involved when nobody is sure what is going on. You can avoid this with just a few steps of pre-meeting prep.
How to Decide If a Meeting Is Essential
Unnecessary and bad meetings disrupt your work and kill productivity. You can have great meetings, with a little bit of forethought.
The Secret to Achieving More: A Good Night’s Sleep
Our bodies are designed to function best with sleep. The secret to win at work and succeed in life, sleep.
5 Reasons You Need to Get Better at Saying No
I have a hard time saying “no.” Perhaps you do, too. I think it is more common than we think, especially for those who are empathetic or nurturing. Here are five reasons why we must get better.
Seven Rules for More Effective Meetings
People get “trained” to come late because they know nothing significant will happen until well after the announced start time…. For example, “the purpose of our meeting is to report on the results of our latest market research and give you a chance to ask questions.” Or, “the purpose of our meeting is to evaluate prospective titles for Don Miller’s new book and determine which one we are going to recommend to the author.”
The Science of Naps
My two-year-old is asleep for the third time today. I thought I had developed a clever disciplinary method when I started telling him that cranky kids need naps, and sending him to bed multiple times. Turns out I was being more clever than I knew. Instead of being better behaved, he just keeps going to […]
Bouncing Back After Burnout
The intentions are noble: You want to buy a house with a backyard for your kids, pay off debt, or do something to actually justify the $50,000 worth of student loans that feels like a noose around your neck. You vow to work harder than everyone else on your team, to be the first one […]
The Importance of Play
This past weekend our family had to cancel a special trip to a friend’s lake house that had been circled on the calendar for months. Our initial weekend plans had play and adventure built into them to recharge the grownups, help us finish a busy season well and open our minds up to new possibilities […]
Get a Life!
For my first job in Washington, DC, I worked very long hours. One night, a rare dinner date was lined up. “What time do you get off?” my date asked to coordinate. A long, awkward pause followed. “It’s kind of a philosophical question,” I finally admitted. That was fine by me at the time, but […]
5 Ways to Hold Shorter Meetings
When Bryan Stockton was pushed out as CEO of toymaker Mattel, he fingered a complacent company culture for dipping profits. In fact, he went one step further and blamed the lack of innovation on bad meetings. Stockton’s story has been on my mind because I’m releasing a new book today called No Fail Meetings. Meetings […]
How to Shut Down Annoying Meeting Behaviors
As a young leader, I was excited to attend the annual gathering of my professional organization. It promised three days of learning and networking, plus a few business sessions. During the first session, one of my elder colleagues, a man wearing bright red suspenders, rose to ask a question, something about whether a point of […]
How Did We End Up with So Many Meetings?
Meetings are a necessity. Meetings also often stink. Typically, they are a waste of time. There are too many meetings—and most of them are often poorly-organized, lack coherent agendas, serve to do little more than reaffirm hierarchies than achieve results. As a result, poorly-run meetings cost companies $37 billion a year in lost productivity. Employees […]
Don’t Bet the Farm on Brainstorming
I can tell you with some precision the moment I first doubted group brainstorming. This was many moons ago. A medium sized media firm that wanted to grow much larger had engaged my consulting services. They held a company-wide powwow, flying most of the managers and yours truly to corporate headquarters in Darkest Peru. The […]
Your Own Personal Time Machine
I spend most of my work-life in meetings. Note-taking is a survival skill. Yet, I am surprised at how few people bother to take notes in meetings. Those who do sometimes express frustration at how ineffective the exercise seems to be. In this post, I’d like to expound on why I think you should take notes in meetings and then offer a few suggestions on how to do it better.
How to Ensure You Never Have Another Terrible Meeting
Ask leaders about the most efficient way to be inefficient, and I bet most will say “bad meetings.” But the hard truth is that meetings are not only inevitable, they’re also essential. Why? If our teams are going to achieve major goals, we need to be able to plan, coordinate, and tackle problems together. The […]
4 Ways Supervisors Frustrate Their Employees—Are You Guilty?
Most people’s frustration at work is inflicted by their supervisors. Here are four specific ways they do so. Are you guilty?
Where Are You the Most Productive?
According to author Jason Fried, work rarely happens at work. Instead, it typically happens outside the office. How can we take advantage of this fact?
Why Most Meetings Still Suck
As long as you have to have meetings, you might as well do them well. Before you plan another meeting (and suffer the rest of us to sit through them), make a commitment to do the following:
Finding More “Head Time”
Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking. We are so busy doing that we have, I fear, almost forgotten how to think. Yet it is our thinking, more than any other single activity, that influences our outcomes.
Ten Annoying Meeting Behaviors
I spend more hours in meetings than out. Perhaps you do, too. Over the years, I have cataloged a list of annoying meeting behaviors or just “AMBs” for short. None of these by themselves are that bothersome. But when you combine three or four of them in the same meeting, it can test the patience of Job.