Tag: #efficiency

Book review posts, Uncategorized

Read This Before Our Next Meeting

amybenoit

“Read This Before Our Next Meeting” was written by Al Pittampalli, the founder of the Modern Meeting Company, which has helped organizations hold more effective meetings. This book was direct and to the point.

In a world with fewer meetings, we’d have more time for our real work, the work we do that actually propels our organizations forward.

The modern meeting:

  • doesn’t make decisions. Leaders do. Consult others via e-mail or one-on-one and make a preliminary decision.
  • has two primary functions: conflict and coordination
  • moves fast and ends on schedule. Strong deadlines force parties to resolve the hard decisions necessary for progress.
  • limits the number of attendees.
  • rejects the unprepared. Prepare an agenda.
  • produces committed action plans. No minutes are required; you only need to know the decision and resulting action plan.
  • refuses to be informational. Reading memos is mandatory.
  • works only alongside a culture of brainstorming

The modern meeting is for finalizing your preliminary decision, generating buy-in, and agreeing on next steps. In advance of the meeting, inform attendees of the decision you plan to make as well as the reasoning behind that decision.

During the meeting, allow attendees to ask questions, voice concerns, and propose modifications. If all goes well, a consensus is achieved, a decision is resolved, and an action plan is coordinated.

Invite only the people who are absolutely necessary for resolving the decision that has been presented. If you have no strong opinion, have no interest in the outcome, and are not instrumental for any coordination that needs to take place, you don’t need to attend.

Prepare an agenda. Every meeting should require pre-meeting work. The modern meeting is about conflict and coordination, two activities that hinge upon preparation.

8 principles of the modern meeting:

  • Only after you’ve reached a preliminary decision can you call a meeting.
  • Get everyone on the same page and create an action plan.
  • Enforce firm meeting end times. The meeting ends, a decision is resolved, and participants get back to work. Start on time.
  • Only people who are critical to the outcome are invited to the modern meeting. Small numbers allow decisions to be resolved quickly and plans to be coordinated smoothly.
  • The modern meeting rejects the unprepared. An agenda is distributed well in advance and establishes the decision being debated or the action being coordinated. You must carefully think through different scenarios and come up with thoughtful responses.
  • The modern meeting produces committed action plans. What actions are we committing to? Who is responsible for each action? When will those actions be completed? It’s the meeting leader’s responsibility to follow up and hold participants accountable for their commitments.
    • If no action plan is necessary, neither is a meeting!
  • Informational meetings aren’t necessary. Managers must write memos instead. Everyone must commit to reading them.
  • The modern meeting is about decision and the narrowing of options. Brainstorming is necessary.

Amazon and Google are both notable in their meeting practices and share many elements of the modern meeting.

This was an interesting book. I agree with some of it, as I have had to attend several meetings just so that management or clients could “check a box” from their weekly to-do list that a meeting was held. This is not effective. However, in my current role, we occasionally have virtual video meetings so that we can get to know and see others we don’t see in person. I enjoy having time set aside for that.

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!

Book review posts, Uncategorized

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals + All About Productivity

amybenoit

“Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” was written by Oliver Burkeman, published in 2021, was named after the concept of an average lifetime being just 4000 weeks, and is one of the most useful books I have ever read.

If you succeed in getting things done on your to-do list, more things will inevitably seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Getting things done won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time” – the demands will increase to offset any benefits. You’ll be creating more things to do.

Oliver Burkemann

The more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worthy of a portion of your time – and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value. This is why it is SO important to learn how to say NO to obligations without feeling guilt, pressure, or obligation.

People complain that they no longer have “time to read,” but the reality, as the novelist Tim Parks has pointed out, is rarely that they can’t locate an empty half hour in the course of the day. What they mean is that when they do find time and use it to try to read, they’re impatient to give themselves to the task because they’re inclined to interruption. Social media and what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.

Tim Parks

When you get tremendously efficient at answering e-mail, all that happens is you get more e-mail.

“Nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live – not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because in reality you never GET a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish.”

“We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. A plan is an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.”

Oliver Burkemann

“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.”

Oliver Burkemann

Spending at least some of your time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way NOT to waste it – to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.

Tips: focus on one big project at a time, keep an open and closed to-do list with a fixed # of entries to have on your current to-do list, establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work, accept that you can’t dedicate as much time as you want to everything and decide in advance what to not give as much effort to in your life, seek out novelty in the mundane and pay more attention in every moment, and practice doing nothing.

When in doubt, do the next most necessary thing.

Five questions to consider:

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? We naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritize anxiety-avoidance.

2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?

3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be? Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality/strengths, weaknesses/talents, and enthusiasm you find yourself with and follow where they lead.

4. In which areas of your life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

If you want to learn or hear more, Oliver Burkemann has been featured on many podcasts on Spotify! I highly recommend listening to this link to a Talks at Google YouTube video with Oliver Burkemann:

This book is one of the best books I have read and I highly recommend it!

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!