Productivity Tip #1: Have More Meetings (But Keep Them Short)

Productivity

Productivity Tip #1

Do your meetings take an hour to do what could’ve been accomplished in fifteen minutes?  Do you look with dread at the colorful blocks on your Outlook calendar telling you your time is about to be wasted?  Here are some ways to trim the fat and make meetings shorter and smarter.

Have More Meetings (But Keep Them Short)
by Matthew E. May

One of the most interesting things I observed over the eight years I spent as a creative advisor to Toyota was how a team of designers or engineers working on the same project might hold several short meetings over the course of the day—sometimes as many a five different times. The interesting aspects were three-fold:

  1. The meetings were not necessarily scheduled. They were held as needed, on a just-in-time basis. Further, they weren’t anchored by any scheduling software timeblocks. In other words, they weren’t slave to some multiple of 15 minutes. They might be 7 minutes, or 22 minutes. I saw one meeting last barely over a minute.
  2. Little discussion occurred. The meetings were held for a single purpose: to make a key decision.
  3. The meetings were in essence a formality. I learned that the Toyota project teams held a completely opposite view of the “meet and confer” philosophy held by most organizations. The “confer” part was held outside the meeting, conducted by individuals in one-on-one dialogs, so that by the time the meeting was held, all team input had been gathered and an informal consensus had been achieved.

Born in the factories of Toyota, “lean” was the term coined the 1996 book Lean Thinking and re-popularized by the 2011 book The Lean Startup. A lean practitioner looks at the world of work as being one of two things: value-adding, or non value-adding. The ultimate goal of becoming lean is to add value by eliminating everything that doesn’t.

While some of the success can be contributed to Toyota’s overall mindset of keeping things lean, the good news is that you don’t have to be Toyota to dramatically improve the results of your meetings in much the same fashion.

The critical starting point is to think of meetings as you would any other process: to be considered lean, a meeting must be characterized by minimal, and preferably absent, non value-adding work.

Read more at 99u.

Do More Great Work

Book Reviews / Productivity

Ever wish you had a map to show you how to avoid unnecessary busywork and focus on the work you know you were meant to do?  In this jam-packed little volume, Michael Bungay Stanier gives you just such a map–fifteen of them, in fact.  His starting premise, that “busy” is not a measure of success, gives him (and you!) latitude to take time working through the maps to find your “Great Work” and make it happen.  And the maps require a fair amount of work, as they’re mostly blank with instructions on how to fill them in according to your own likes, dislikes, work habits, and ideas.   (Got a library copy?  The maps are available for free at the author’s website.)

As well as maps that help you determine your which of your many great ideas should be your Great Work and how to go about doing it, the book is stuffed with short essays on related topics like not settling for Good Work when you could be doing Great Work (73), “How to Say No When You Can’t Say No” (90), and the virtues of laziness (85).  As Stanier writes, “Lazy people are often extremely efficient, because they look for the fastest, easiest way of doing things.”

Boring tasks getting in the way of your real work?  Stanier has tips to make them go away, or at least go faster.  The combination of visually-oriented map templates and inset text  from multiple prominent business authors and bloggers makes it easy to work through the book at an individual pace, especially for those of us with short attention spa–ooh, a bunny!  (Sorry.)Most importantly, working through the book forces you to articulate your ideas and determine specific actions to take that will turn them into reality, even if these steps will upset the proverbial applecart.  After all, “[i]f everyone’s happy, then you’re not doing Great Work.”  Take the time.  Do the maps.  Find your purpose.

Do More Great Work
Michael Bungay Stanier
New York: Workman Publishing, 2010