Productivity Cafe

Long Meeting – boring or engaging?

Have you sat through day-long meetings with the most memorable part being the numbness you felt in your bum, the big blinks you took at 2pm because you were fighting a snooze reflex after the hotel meal, or thinking, "How many freaking speakers are there?"

I recently received this message from "John" in Atlanta.

Hello Susan ... would you have a suggestion how to keep attendees of a daylong seminar stimulated until the end? I read your article on organizing a meeting, but an all day seminar is hard to keep people attentive. We have 7 speakers, and we are all in one room, usually 250 to 500 people. We are in a convention hall, and the main topic is financial investing.

Here's my reply to John. Hopefully you find something to make your next long meeting better here:

Keeping the audience engaged for a whole day is an art form as well a specific set of skills.

Here are 3 quick proven ways to engage people throughout the day:

1.      Make sure they move from the seat they started in at least every 20 minutes. Use group problem solving, sharing in pairs, and similar activities (and urge that people cannot have the person to their left or right as their partner). The success of this is 100% in the setup (the way it's presented to participants).

2.      (foreshadowed above). Have the participants do activities that require them to talk, think, and assimilate the information given to them.

3.      Hire a facilitator or Master of Ceremonies. Good facilitators preview the meeting, make suggestions, and guide the meeting to successful engagement throughout.

Oh, and, end before an 8 hour day is done.

p.s. send me your questions - I love helping you have 'the good life' in work & out

Spacebar - Technology Tool Tips

The shortcuts and quick keystrokes available on our computers could fill a book. But, who would pick up a book of shortcuts and digest more than a few at a time? Not me! You? For a while I am going to make Tuesday 'Tech Tool Tuesday' and offer some efficient shortcuts for you to try right away. Some will seem glaringly basic to you but to someone who has been doing things the way she's been doing them since she got her first computer some shortcuts will be marvelously helpful. So, skip those you know and try those you don't. Let us know how it goes!

1. When you're reading a web page, the spacebar will scroll down one page or frame.
2. When completing online forms, the spacebar will check and uncheck check-boxes.
3. To create the copyright symbol © type (c) (left paren, c, right paren, spacebar). Some versions of word and excel don't require the space.

Procrastinating? Tell someone!

If you are procrastinating there are a few steps you can take to get the ball

rolling and to achieve your goals. Here are some of the steps that worked on a recent bout with procrastination of my own.

1. Recognize that you're procrastinating.
2. Narrow the thing you're avoiding as much as possible.
3. Prepare as if you're not putting things off.
4. When you stall, tell someone.
5. Follow their advice.
6. Report back to your someone.

Let me tell you story of my procrastination as it followed these steps.

I recognized that I was procrastinating because my desk is super organized, follow-up to almost everything pending is complete, I keep making trips to the kitchen for a snack, and I was not picking up the phone to find out the information I need (my goal).

I narrowed all the possible things that I was avoiding to one phone call. The goal of that phone call was to uncover the next step that I have to take with Dad's estate. I know this is the thing that I was avoiding because almost everything else I need to do is done. I was happy to chat with my sister, my business Mastermind group, and almost everyone. I tidied my storage room, my notebooks, my computer, my kitchen (the curse of working at home), and my closet. I'd put getting the answers on the back burner while a presentation deadline loomed even though I might have been able to achieve both deadlines. After the other deadline past I was free to work on the estate question. I put it off for 10 days.

Finally I prepared as if I wasn't putting off this phone call. I reviewed a teleseminar focused on the topic of the question. I made a list of the 6 specific segments of this question that needed clarification. I was really scared by this because it seemed so obtuse and like asking these questions was going to lead to a multitude of related tasks. I was sitting here with all the documentation in front of me 100% prepared to make the call.

I picked up the phone and dialed… a business friend (notice I justified the call by calling it business). This was a major stall move! After I checked in on an issue she's wrestled with for the last week I did it. I said, "I need you to hold me accountable to making a call about Dad's Estate." And then, the tide turned. By asking LM to hold me accountable I had given myself the push to take the action I'd been avoiding and to make the call. I didn't want to have to report that I was continuing to procrastinate. I was on my way to actually making the call (though with dread).

I picked up the phone and dialed – the people with the estate answers this time. Whayland said he couldn't help me. My mind screamed, "Oh no, I knew this was going to be painful." Wayland transferred me to Chuck. Twenty two minutes later I hung up the phone with my answers, confidence, and elation. It turned out these guys really did have the answers and it wasn't going to require talking to a half-dozen people. The answers they gave me are manageable. The complexity I anticipated was 50 times what it actually is. And my procrastination is no more.

Of course I called LM immediately and told her the good news.

Now I have new, doable things on my ToDo list and can keep moving forward on Dad's estate.

What have you been avoiding doing?

Why don't you identify exactly what you're avoiding and try telling someone about it. Be brave after you tell them about it and say, "Would you hold me accountable?" Feel free to offer a prize or penalty for yourself (whichever motivates you more). Watch and feel how your mindset changes once you've made your issue public. Override the procrastination and get that big thing done!

Schedule Your Priorities

The way to make sure that you do the things that are really impactful is to put them on your calendar. Steven Covey is the famous author of The 7 Habits Series of books and he makes this point succinctly in the quote above. When you are scheduled for the things that are really important and let the less important thing take only the 'extra' time you have, you are on the road to feeling in control, productive, and being successful.

The opposite of scheduling your priorities is letting other people take your time, reacting to the emergency of the moment (found when you checked your email no doubt), and losing site of what you're responsible to do. This usually is accompanied by stress, overwhelm, and working overtime.

Kim has an appointment with her assistant every morning at 8:15am without fail. They look at the day ahead and coordinate the things that should be done and must be done. They look at the days ahead and begin preparation for meetings and projects due soon. By scheduling this appointment every morning Kim & Allen (the assistant) stay on top of everything and are usually calm, cool, and collected.

Back in my days at Hewlett-Packard a department head, Tom, would take time at the end of the week to write a quick list of accomplishments. He had his List Making on his calendar and rarely missed those 15 minutes with his career planning. That list allowed him to sell himself into a number of positions that advanced his career quickly. His priority to keep his career front & center by making an appointment with himself paid big dividends.

What are you allowing to take over your schedule? What would you schedule and protect to reach the ends your have as goals?

Meetings, Money and Morale

Millions of dollars of time are invested in meetings. Bad meetings mean lots of wasted money. Bad meetings mean diminished morale. Is this problem worse than email domination? I'm not sure but it's up there on the list of things that ruin people's work day.

It's seldom that I review my consulting work with you. Today is one of those rare days. That's because this is a vivid situation that I'd like to share with you and explore over a number of articles here. I'm passionate about stopping waste and especially passionate about stopping waste of such a limited and precious resource as time.

Let's start with the characteristics of bad meetings. There are lots of them. Here are my top 5:

• No agenda
• An agenda that isn't followed
• Starting late and running late
• One person dominating the meeting
• Making everyone hear material again while a latecomer is briefed
• Lack of follow-through (I know, this is #6 but I couldn't pick any to leave off)

What's on your list?

Here's the calculation. This organization has between 6,000 and 7,000 employees. If we can save each one from a badly-run one-hour meeting once a week the savings for the company is in the range of $2,750,000 per year. If we can save them from two one-hour meetings, well, this is an urgently needed improvement.

Going beyond the value of the time saved will be increased productivity. While people are out of meetings they'll actually be getting their work done. And, not having to prepare for wasteful meeting frees up even more time and lightens the workload burden.

And best of all, these employees will be happier. Happy employees mean productive employees. Morale will get a boost when employees feel heard, feel like they're contributing, and determine their time is applied satisfactorily (rather than wasted in some meetings).

It's curious that well run, well prepared meetings seem to be the exception rather than the rule. How is it in the company where you work? Comment below so we can start talking about this meeting culture.

Lose Your Watch and Gain Perspective

Don't wear a watch to work this week. This is an experiment in time management. Looking at your watch while you're in a meeting is a highly distracting thing you can do to a conversation. Looking down at your watch tells the other person that you're conscious of the time and leads to interpretation that either you're going to motor through things, draw things out, think about what's next rather than give 100% and a number of other signals. Signals that you probably aren't meaning to give.  Recall the man who has a suit on and extends his arm far enough for the jacket and shirt sleeve to uncover his watch – about a subtle as a siren on an emergency vehicle. 

So, lose your watch and use their watch! It's easy and usually invisible to the other person when you glance across the desk or table and read their watch. You can keep on schedule, maintain awareness of the pace of a meeting, and be unobtrusive while you do it.

When you don't wear a watch you will notice how many other sources for time there are:

• Your cell phone or PDA
• Clocks everywhere – at people's desks, in awards sitting on the shelf, and in your car
• In the hallway and back of meeting rooms
• On instruments
• At the bank sign
• On every computer screen
• Your companion's wrist

Try stepping out of the 'box' and watch how well you can operate. This is a big step after decades of wearing a watch – and a good way to stretch your skills!

 

Wait Time Doesn’t Have to Mean Waste Time

Adding your wait time throughout a day could sum up to an hour or more. Reinvesting that time would allow you to stay in touch (network), finish a report, read a book, or get your car washed.  It could help your career advance and your happiness quotient!

The first step to converting wait time is to recognize where it is wasted time today. Here are a few frequently spotted examples:

• A room is booked for a meeting before yours and those in the prior meeting go over time leaving you and your peers standing outside the door – perhaps pacing outside the door.
• Information meant to get to you is delayed
• The computers are down
• Someone is late to a meeting and the person who initiated the meeting doesn't start until everyone arrives even if it's 10 minutes or more late
• A co-worker is so overloaded that his part of your part of a project takes a back seat for days and you can't proceed without that part
• You wait by the microwave while components for dinner defrost

The next step to converting wait time to productive time is to work to eliminate waste. Let's highlight the waste in some of situations above as a way to identify waste that could be eliminated.

• The room could be made available for only the first 45 minutes of each hour it's bookable. The meeting facilitator of your meeting could show up early and respectfully urge the prior group to leave. Every

Scheduling Meetings You Have Repeatedly Using Outlook

You have a new weekly appointment with your manager because your career development is on her radar screen this year (that's a good thing!). That appointment is every Friday morning at 10am for 45 minutes. You want to populate your calendar for the next 6 months of meetings – thank goodness you're using Outlook because writing it on a paper calendar for 26 weeks would take you 20 minutes. With Outlook it will take you 20 seconds.  You're going to enter a recurring appointment. Here's how:

1. Go to your calendar in Outlook.
2. Create a new appointment (ctrl-n)
3. Complete the subject line with something like: Weekly Mtg. with Mgr.
4. Set the time for 10:00 ending at 11:00 just in case the meeting runs long.
5. Click on recurrence and complete the options in the box for frequency, start date, end date
6. Click OK
7. Save & close the new appointment
8. Look at the Fridays for the next few months and confirm that your manager meeting shows up on every one.

Some enhancements to setting this appointment that you might want to make:

6 Tips for Arriving On Time

Those of you who usually arrive late know who you are… the people you're inconveniencing also know who you are. So we'll save the point counterpoint discussion regarding being late for another article and offer ways to get your attractive face, magnetic personality, and vital intelligence to places on time.

First you need to firmly embrace what on time means. On time is to say you're in position and ready to contribute on the appointed clock time. Meetings that begin at 9:30 have you in place and done chatting by 9:25-28. Think of your commitments as European trains that leave so precisely on time that you could set your clock by them. Picture a meeting starting without you giving you that pit in the stomach feeling of you standing on the platform while the train pulls away. In other words, missing the train and beginning of meetings is not negotiable. You have to be there when it starts.

Practice exit strategies so you leave previous meetings or events far enough in advance to get where you have to go next early. Exit strategies include telling your co-workers when you must leave at the beginning of the meeting so they work to that deadline at the end of the meeting. It includes the whole set of interruption interceptions covered elsewhere here. Exit strategies include respectful lines that allow you to leave such as, "Thanks for the update, I have another meeting in 10 minutes and it's 8 minutes away so I have got to wrap this up now and get on my way. I look forward to our next conversation."

Ignore your email when you're passing your desk between meetings. Chances are you will want to write a quick reply, leave a brief voicemail response, or note a reminder on your action list. This attention to the email master (you're the slave) is a frequent obstacle to people getting places on time.

Do not set your watch ahead. Some people put their watch 10 minutes ahead as a way to fool themselves to being on time. In reality you know that you have built the '10 minute cushion' into your watch time and you consistently accommodate that reality. There is the additional complication of knowing what your watch says compared to those in public places or your counterpart's. Get real – set your watch on the time your computer has.

Use alarms in your calendar. Whether you're a PC or MAC user your calendar has an alarm function. When you set a meeting, include an alarm reminding you to get on your way to the meeting on time. If you work on a campus where you might have to go to another building, calculate travel, parking, and walking time when you schedule the meeting, add 5 minutes, and have your alarm ring that far in advance. Maria works on a campus and sometime she walks to the next building, 4 minutes away. Other times she has to get in the car and drive over a busy highway and sit through 6 stoplights to get to another building. She must plan 10 minute departure for the close building and 20 minutes for the distant building. Doing the planning in advance to set the alarm ensures she is free to work right up to departure time and she does the calculation once.

For you who are usually latecomers, visualize the possible surprise and probable appreciative recognition you'll receive for arriving on time (or 5 minutes early).

What Everybody Ought to Know about Using a Calendar

Can you tell quickly whether you're due at a personal appointment or business meeting? How would you like to never miss a birthday or anniversary again? One easy action can help you see your day or month clearly at a glance. That action: color code your calendar! When I demonstrated this one to 50 sales people yesterday the oh's and ah's reminded me of people watching fireworks. This will probably hit a chord for you.

Here is a copy of a calendar created in Outlook (with names erased to protect the anonymity of people):

 

One can pick out the business meetings (blue) and differentiate them from the personal meetings (yellow) swiftly.