It seems that every time I check the news these days I’m met with another study that says inactivity shortens our lives. It rots our brains. It wrecks our blood chemistry, even if we exercise every day. Let me be clear: it’s not just that exercise is beneficial – we all know that already….
Category Archives: Meetings
How Much Time Is There In An Eight-Hour Day?
Does this sound like a trick question? Let me ask it another way: have you ever planned to get a certain amount of work done only to find at the end of the day that you need another three or four hours to finish what you’d planned? Whether we work alone in a home office…
The Won't-Do List
Productivity is as much about what we choose not to do as it is about what we do. (Remember the Evil Overlord List? 100 tongue-in-cheek won’t-do entries that begins, “Being an Evil Overlord seems to be a good career choice.”) With this in mind, I’d like to supplement my list of committed tasks…
Humans are natural procrastinators
A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times. – Sir John Dalberg-Acton Hold on, Sir John! Is it possible that delay serves a good purpose? And if, like our appendix, delay has outlived its usefulness, how can we work around it with…
The Jump-start Meeting
Recently I was seated next to Laura Van Galen, the dynamic head of Bleu Marketing, a full-service direct marketing firm based in San Francisco. She described to me a practice she uses with her senior team, the daily jump-start meeting. Here’s how the jump-start meeting works: every morning each manager has three minutes to describe…
Meetings: stand up
As described in my organizing colleague John Trosko’s blog, one Los Angeles-area company found an effective way to keep its meetings “right sized” — they shed their chairs and held meetings standing up. Meetings that had been 30 to 60 minutes shrank to about half their former time. Think of the value to your business…
Meetings: a quote
A quote for the day: But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done. Wherever a time log shows the fatty degeneration of meeting — wherever for instance, people in an organization…
Meetings: what Warren Buffet found
by Margaret Lukens, New Leaf + Company LLC The January 18 issue of USA Today included an interview with former Coca Cola president and Berkshire Hathaway board member Don Keogh, which contained this revealing item: Speaking of Berkshire Hathaway chairman and America’s second richest man Warren Buffet, Keogh observed, “Buffet bought a company a couple…