September’s productivity tips – Making Meetings Magic!









Have you ever sat in a meeting and wondered a) what on earth you were doing there and b) whether there was any way to escape and find something more useful to do with your time?
We’ve all been there. So what can we do to change this? Well, here are five quick tips to improve your meetings and in turn, improve your productivity!

Skip Meetings!

The truth is, meetings seem to the organiser like a “free” activity, whereas in reality, meetings are one of the costliest business activities there are. They not only cost our organisations money, but they rob us of our attention. Tim Ferriss has a great take on this in his book “The 4- Hour Work Week” where he suggests a range of cheeky tactics to avoid meetings. He suggests doing everything possible to skip those two hour update meetings and simply read the minutes or catch a quick update from a colleague. Cheating is OK! Tim’s general approach to productivity is pretty ruthless and not for everyone, but here he is talking about the book.

Purpose

Think about the last few meetings you attended. At each of those meetings, do you remember the chair reminding people of the purpose of the meeting at the very beginning and revisiting that purpose at the end? Probably not! Purpose is critical, and meetings (usually) need leadership, so don’t be afraid to be the one clarifying the purpose beforehand or drawing people back to it as the meeting goes on.

Huddle

2 hour update meetings are long, boring and inefficient, whereas if you break that same update communication into a structured 15 minutes a day, you’ll actually start to see amazing results from relentless alignment to the key numbers and key questions in your team or in your company. At Think Productive, we developed a daily huddle based on the principles from Verne Harnish’s excellent book “Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits”. Here’s me explaining more.

Being prepared

If you’re the one running a meeting, you need to ensure you’ve covered all the bases. Our meetings magician, Martin Farrell, runs meetings with the UN Climate Change Secretariat, the Cabinet Office and a range of international organisations. Here he is talking about his 5P’s+1 framework, which helps keep everything on track.

Follow through!

If you’re running a meeting, try to focus your time and energy using the 40-20-40 approach: spend 40% of your focus on the preparation, 20% on the session itself and 40% on productive follow-through, holding people to account and ensuring that agreements are kept-to. We usually focus most of our energy on the meeting itself, and miss the two most important stages. The 40-20-40 approach is from the excellent book, Meeting together.

Hope these tips help you make your Meetings Magic!

Free- Productive! Magazine

Our friend Michael at Nozbe is also the head honcho over at Productive! Magazine, for which I’m a guest contributor. You can download the magazine for free here and there’s also a rather beautiful iPad app as well – check it out!

Bring a Productivity Ninja to sort out your office!

We’d love to talk to you about our in-house workshops: Getting Your Inbox to Zero, Email Etiquette, How to Get Things Done, Making Meetings Magic, Smells Like Team Spirit & How to be a Productivity Ninja.

Or come along to one of our public workshops…

Click on the relevant date below to book your place now – with our new 3 tiered pricing system. Fair, transparent and a fantastic return on investment.

The South West

Bristol:
Friday, 18th November

The South East

London:
Tuesday, 27th September
Friday, 11th November
2012 London dates

The Midlands and the North

Birmingham:
Friday, 2nd December


Have a playful, productive month and we’ll see you in October!

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Bigger is better well for presentations anyway

meeting training, chairing meeting training

How many times have you sat in a presentation and had no idea what’s on the slides because they’re just too small. It’s so simple to put right. Here’s what you do.

Make them bigger!

Which means having fewer slides and fewer points on each. Have five slides with five points on each is a good idea. If you reckon you can’t fit in all your wonderful points, then take a walk and think about what you really want people to remember at the end of your presentation. Just put those points down.
Bigger is much better. And less is much more.

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Play buzzword bingo for boring presentations

time management training, meeting training, meeting workshops, meeting workshop uk

If you find yourself listening to a boring presentation (or a series of them!) at a potentially important conference, try playing buzzword bingo.

As the speaker/s starts to use general buzz words and phrases (agenda, driving, delivering, key, moving forward, manage bright ideas and more specialist jargon words and abbreviations, list them on your notepad. As the speaker/s repeat them, tick the relevant word/phrase (but avoid shouting ‘bingo’ when you get 5 ticks!)

This serves two purposes: It helps to keep your mind on what the speaker is saying (you’re listening and note-taking) and, at the end of the session/conference, you have a succinct record of what the speaker/s covered.

Bingo!!!

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Making effective and productive meetings

Think of how many hours we all spend in meetings. Then think how magnificent it would be if every single one was powerful, purposeful and helped you make decisions which worked for you and for the common good. Yes, every meeting is a priceless opportunity to surprise ourselves with just how much we can achieve together. Below are a few tips to help you on your way, for a more indepth look at making meetings magic visit our meetings workshop page.

Go on – don’t
How many times have you been bored by someone who spoke too long? How many times have you been surprised that someone on a platform spoke too little? Probably lots of the former and not much of the latter. So say what you have to say, and sit down. (It’s like drilling – strike oil and then stop boring.)

Don’t go to meetings – and we’ll all go home early
Fixing a meeting often seems like a good idea at the time. But it can also be a way of putting off actually doing anything. Its tempting – travelling to meetings when we don’t need to. Feels like we’re doing something when we’re not being proeductive. So do it a different way. First choice is meeting on the phone. Fix a time and stick to it. Save yourself the trip

Fix a time and stick to it (10.30 means … 10.30)
We all lose lots of time calling people who’re not there or who in a good frame of mind to talk to us. So fix a precise time to speak – and say you’ll call them rather than have them call you. Call them at precisely that time. Not before or after and earn yourself a reputation for being on the button. As well as increasing the chances of you both being ready to talk, it also tells them that you want to do business and get on with things

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A room to say “you matter”

When people walk into a room for a meeting, they’ll pick up lots of things in the first few moments. They will only be conscious of a few of them but all will make a difference to how they feel and what they say and do when they’re in the room. If you’re the person chairing the meeting that matters a lot. So … be there a bit early so you can prepare the space:

remove old coffee cups and papers left over by the previous occupants of the room have a kettle boiling with hot water or prepared flasks so people can be welcomed with a cup of something warming;

Open the window if it’s stuffy, close it if it’s noisy;

Put chairs so there’s one for everyone you expect to come; if you’re not sure who’ll turn up, have some spare in the corner;

If there’s a flip chart, write up the name of the meeting, with the day and date maybe adding ‘welcome’ – so that when people arrive they can relax because they know straightaway that they’ve made it to the right place;

If you’re facilitating an awayday, you might bring some flowers to put in the corner or some chocolates to share round.

These kind of things will give people the message ‘you matter’. So if you really do think they matter, let people know – by the subconscious messages they receive. And if they know that you think they matter, they’ll probably be more forthcoming in the meeting – because they’ll know that you think what they say matters too.

Think Productive provide workshops in chairing meetings training. Our workshops are designed to help you get the most out of your meeting, our goal is to help you making meetings magic

See Time to Think – listening to ignite the human mind; Nancy Kline; Ward Lock Chapter 11

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Feedback that is going to make a difference

Feedback that is going to make a difference has the following ingredients:

what you say is true, (it’s a fact, not your opinion i.e. it’s first hand experience not something you heard from someone else);

it is succinct (if you’re not clear enough to be succinct, find someone to talk to and get things clear in your mind first);

it’s about someone’s observable behavior and is something which they could change i.e. it’s not something about them personally that they can’t change;

you give a recent example of what you’re talking about;

you deliver it direct to the person or people whom it concerns, not to third parties;

you give your feedback at a suitable time and place (e.g. when you’ve got time to follow up if you need to. Positive feedback can be given when other people might be able to hear. ‘Could do better’ kind of feedback should be done one to one.)

If you implement these simple guidelines the next time you are giving feedback you will find your input is a lot more to the point and valuable.

Think Productive also offer a workshop in Making Meetings Magic.

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Meetings –begin with the end in mind

Meetings are all too often the part of our workday that we feel is wasted, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Our Making Meetings Magic workshop teaches a range of techniques that you can use both as a participant and as a chair in order to do just that: it’s like Facilitation training but with a practical approach that uses participants’ actual meeting planning to really make a difference whilst embedding the learning. We focus on the time management aspect of meetings, but also on the politics, the nuances and the logistics too. Magic!

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Meetings – use the 40-20-40 model

How many times a week do you get home from work and say to yourself, “wow, what a great meeting we just had?!”. Here at Think Productive we are on a mission! Meetings are all too often the part of our workday that we feel is wasted, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Our Making Meetings Magic workshop teaches the 40-20-40 model from the book ‘Meeting Together’. This can be a really helpful way to think about the time management aspect of meetings, rather than simply the ‘20% in the middle’: the meeting itself.

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