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How often do you hear a colleague say, “I’m so excited to attend today’s group meeting,” or a student remark, “How is it possible that my group meetings are so stimulating and engaging?”

What’s that? You’ve never heard anyone say those things? Me neither. I dread meetings for the same reason that everyone does: They’re usually a waste of time…..So I decided to intervene. But instead of telling everyone what I, as principal investigator, thought the new format should be, I decided to have it originate from the group itself. I wanted our meetings crisis to be resolved from within, collectively, with a dash of Obama 2008—in other words, “We are the meeting we have been waiting for.”

These are the questions I posed: Why weren’t people contributing during our meetings? Why did they take their phones out? What did they think would make the meeting experience better?

At first only a few people raised their hands to offer suggestions. Then more. And more. And then the room filled with a robust discussion. Every single person in the room participated. Everyone. It was the liveliest and most collaborative meeting we’d ever had. We discussed, we argued, we complained, we made fun of ourselves. We got it all out and then some. We reclaimed the importance of our time together as a group. And then we voted on the completely new structure that we had come up with.

I’ll tell you the particulars of that structure, but not before offering a warning: Our approach to meetings might not be the right one for every group. The format should depend on the people and the type of research involved. The key is that, whatever the format, it has to have come from the members themselves.

During our intervention, an idea that became extremely important was that of the meeting as an “opportunity.” That word kept being repeated. We talked about how badly we had been squandering the opportunity, how valuable it could be, and how much we all wanted to maintain it. (Yes, not having group meetings at all was on the table, but nobody wanted that. Really.) In fact, what came out of our group catharsis was a realization that this opportunity was the only one in which all of us—with different ways of thinking, different backgrounds, and different interests working on different problems—could come together to talk about research.

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Regrouping the Group Meeting by Jeffrey C. Grossman

You don’t have to say you are away to use your “out of office” feature. You just have to be bold. My favorite flavor of bold is the Texan Dean who declares in an email bouceback that the eight people and email addresses listed serve as portals for specific types of emails, including the category “everything else”—and none of the addresses are hers.

Since most of us won’t get to use that version, others with appeal include:

• “I monitor my email several times a day. For urgent needs reach me at: [CELL PHONE/PAGER].”
• “Research finds the brain is less efficient when multi-tasking. As an exercise in sequential tasking and concentration, I am checking in on email once mid-morning and once mid-afternoon. Thanks for awaiting my most accurate and focused response.”

Or when you need extra focus:

• “I will not be in email until 1pm today. If you need to contact me before then please call or text [cell number].”
• “Our team is completing a grant this week; we will handle admissions emails once early in the day and once in the afternoons. Don’t hesitate to call [KEY PERSON] for more urgent needs.”

The current Edge for Scholars poll considers whether “setting an email away message to have time to focus”

• Gets me too far behind on email
• Nags at my conscience about what I might miss
• Is a secret weapon for concentrating

Looks like 77% of us can’t shut it down because of fear of drowning or guilt for not babysitting our in-box with sufficient attention (the first two responses). Maybe more of us should be bold and publically timebox our email, assuring real time to concentrate. We miss real opportunities to be in the creative flow of our work when we respond to every email chime.

I hope we can agree that very little in our work lives is actually on fire. There should be no need for guilt if we prefer to exit and enter the stream of messages when it best fits in our plans for navigating the day.

Katherine Hartmann, MD, PhD
Associate Dean, Clinical and Translational Scientist Development
Vanderbilt University

Do You Put the PRO in Procrastination?

Procrastination is closely related to impatience. Their kinship is based on our bias toward the present over the future. Both are examples of the human tendency to overdiscount future events. In both impatience and procrastination, we overweight the immediate. The main difference between the two is whether the immediate thing we are overweighting is a benefit or a cost. When what is immediate is a benefit, we are impatient gluttons, overindulging and consuming more than we should. But when what is immediate is a cost, we are procrastinators, putting off activities we should get done today.

From Fast Company: The Procrastination-Killing Tactic to Try Now (Or in 10 Minutes)

Frank Partnoy describes himself as an inveterate procrastinator–and the banker/lawyer/author is not convinced that’s a bad thing. His book Wait: The Art and Science of Delay is an investigation into his own habits of prolonged decision-making and the shortsightedness that pervaded crisis-era finance. Fast Company talked with Partnoy about when to make decisions, how to manage time, and why better-paid people are less happy.

From Fast Company: Lessons in Productive Procrastination

Haste makes waste: Consider the new Apple Maps app. The drift toward speed at all costs is becoming one of the most prevalent blind spots in leadership today–here’s how to force yourself to put on the brakes.

From Fast Company: The Need for Speed Is Killing Your Company

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.