Posts Tagged 'meetings'

Our Shrinking Attention Span and What to Do About It

Posted on November 28th, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Photo by Daniel Cañibano on Unsplash Recently I gave my History of Computing lecture to a group of hi-tech employees. After I’d finished, an engineer came to me and complimented me in an unexpected way. “These days”, he said,  “I have a three minute attention span. After three minutes of listening to anything out comes my smartphone… but in your lecture I put it right back in my pocket!” It is pleasant to hear this kind of feedback, but as an information overload expert it set my mind thinking about the first part of his comment. The part about the.. Read more

How to Respond to a Ringing Phone in a Meeting

Posted on May 31st, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I once talked to a manager who shared this story: she’d been interviewing a young hiring candidate when his phone went off. He answered it, and it was his wife who wanted to wish him success at the interview. She told me she’d felt it was immature of him to pick up the call, though luckily for him she did not hold this against him when she made her decision. But this story made me think: did the young man do anything wrong? Or was it the right thing to do? Pros: By answering the call, he was showing respect.. Read more

New Insight Article: How to Make Meetings Effective

Posted on June 27th, 2018 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Organizational Solutions

The data is clear: meetings are one of the two worst productivity killers in the knowledge workplace (the other, of course, is email overload). If you work in a corporate environment (or in a large organization in the public sector) you know this problem very well. Which is a damned shame, because meetings are supposed to be the place where brains come together to share knowledge, create insight, solve problems… they are supposed to be a focus of exuberant creativity that generates value and bottom line profit. They can be all that… but we’ve subverted them to be the very.. Read more

24 Hours: Thoughts on Email, Meetings, and Life Priorities

Posted on February 5th, 2018 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

Image: Paolo Uccello’s 15th century 24 hour clock at the Florence cathedral. If you are a knowledge worker, you are most likely used to working fifty, sixty, even seventy hours a week. The higher numbers are standard in hi-tech culture, as seen for example in Silicon Valley. This fact has important ramifications that I explore in this post. The cold equations The basic equation governing our lifetime allocation is the following: Daily hours = Work hours + Life hours + Maintenance hours Where Life = family time, leisure, hobbies, reading, rest, etc. Maintenance = eating, sleeping, personal care, etc. And.. Read more

New Insight Article: How to Reduce Meeting Footprint in Your Organization

Posted on May 14th, 2014 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

  Meeting load is a problem in many enterprises, and a good way to improve productivity in them is to have less of people’s time spent on meetings, freeing them to do other work. At first this seems to mean holding fewer meetings, but of course that is an oversimplification: meetings are a vital part of doing business. What you really need is to optimize what I like to call the footprint of the meetings you hold. My recent insight article, titled How to Reduce Meeting Footprint in Your Organization, analyzes the many ways this can be effected. Enjoy!

Who Will Teach Oratory to our Employees?

Posted on January 23rd, 2014 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

An under-appreciated skill There is an art, or a skill, called Oratory, or Public Speaking, and in my current career it’s part of the required tool set: without the ability to speak well in a public setting I couldn’t make a living delivering interesting lectures, something I take great pleasure in doing. However, the art of eloquent speaking goes far beyond formal lecture delivery: it is what people do all the time in a business setting, whenever they present a PowerPoint presentation or just speak to assembled colleagues or managers in order to impart information and influence a decision. And.. Read more

Default Settings for Scheduling a Productive Meeting

Posted on November 8th, 2013 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

In a perfect world… In a perfect world, your calendar application would have a slider control in the meeting scheduling interface captioned “Productivity”. The slider would have calibrations next to it, ranging from “Total waste of everyone’s time” to “Superbly productive meeting”.  Anyone scheduling a meeting could select whether they wanted the meeting to be effective, and how much so. Then again, in a perfect world, would anyone select a setting other than “Superbly productive” for their meetings? So  we could eliminate the slider, and just have the default setting be  the productive one. Right? … and in our world.. Read more

Crafting Effective PowerPoint Presentations: Food for Thought

Posted on December 10th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

In a previous post I promised you to write about how to craft great PowerPoint presentations. I was planning to give you a list of “do this, do that” tips, but I found myself thinking about some underlying factors that make a slide presentation effective (or not). This turned out much more interesting than just a list of tips, so I’ll share my conclusions with you as food for thought. The conclusions pretty much agree with the way I write presentations for my lectures; I will give you some pointers at the end. Do you really need a “Great PowerPoint.. Read more

How to Write Terrible PowerPoint Presentations

Posted on November 8th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Microsoft’s PowerPoint can be a blessing or a curse.  Either way, it is an inseparable part of our business environment (though you do occasionally run into a presenter with the skill and self-assurance to avoid PowerPoint presentations altogether). The trick is to make your PowerPoint presentations into effective tools that you wield to achieve your goals, rather than the converse. I’ve been using PowerPoint for almost two decades, and have seen it used endlessly by others. I still use it today in my public speaking role, where it’s imperative that it do good. And it never ceases to amaze me.. Read more

Why Business Travel Freezes are Bad for Your Business

Posted on October 15th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A familiar knee-jerk reaction We’ve all been there. The economy goes into the down side of one of its never-ending spasmodic cycles and the word comes down: Freeze all business travel! The urge to batten the hatches when times get rough is understandable and necessary; that’s how responsibly-managed companies survive the hard times. It’s just that a sweeping ban on business travel makes no sense at all in the context of survival, because such travel has an important role in securing the future of the very company you’re trying to help. It never ceases to amaze me how the significance.. Read more