I have been following Guy Kawasaki for some time on twitter. With truemors.com and alltop.com he has been trying out new ways of presenting information to us busy knowledge workers. I have started to really like the concept behind Alltop.
Whenever I have to wait at an airport or train station I like to go to the kiosk and skim through some magazines of interest. Well Alltop is just like that, online. It delivers condensed information on a wide variety of topics. Without having to leave the page you can look for just that piece of information and click for a full post. Really great!
Well lifehacking is now a topic on Alltop and my blog happens to be on that page! So if you want more quality content on lifehacking and productivity, check out lifehacks.alltop.com.
written by Fokke
During my commute to the office this morning I sat next to a very executive lady. She was flipping through at least 200 hundred freshly printed pages of paper. From the looks of it, minutes, memos and other valuable material for an upcoming meeting. From the expression on her face I got the impression that she hadn’t prepared for the meeting and that the meeting was not more that 60 minutes away.
I was thinking about my pre-GTD time where I had several tricks to mask being not prepared in a meeting. I wrote dates in the upper right corner of every first page, with my autograph. I sometimes folded the corners to give the impression that I read the whole thing. Watching the lady made me feel a bit embarrassed while thinking back. How foolish a person can become!
How much money is wasted here. The time and effort to write the memos and other stuff. The paper and the time of the meeting that most probably won’t be very effective. “Lets think about it some more and discuss it in the next meeting….”
I have developed some habits in this area to stop this silly practice.
1. If someone asks me to write something I first try to find out what the successful outcome is for the person I need to write that piece for. When I ask someone to write a memo I give a specific outcome for the memo, a problem to solve or a solution to propose.
2. If I haven’t been able to prepare myself or read a piece I just excuse myself upfront and tell I wasn’t able to read it. Most of the time I haven’t been a slacker but there was just too much in my schedule. Or to be honest, it wasn’t worth reading. It is better to just say just that than keep alive a practice that only deliver drawers full of memos, vision documents and project plans that no one will ever pay attention to.
3. If minutes for a meeting are overdone I just stick with an action list. Sometimes minutes are required but if not, most of the time an action list will just do. How can someone call a meeting where you have to speak about 200 hundred pages anyway? Not unless the meeting lasts a couple of days.
To those who read this and remember me in a meeting with those folded corners and nice autographed date stamped memos, I am sorry to have fooled you. And for that matter I am sorry that I was fooling myself!
written by Fokke
This afternoon I had the privilege to attend a workshop of Marshall Goldsmith in Dauphine in Amsterdam. In a few weeks his book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” will be available in Dutch.
One of the points he stressed is that we should pay more attention to behaviors that we should stop instead of telling our selfs what we should do. We should stop wanting to win all the time, telling the world how smart we really are. Also he pointed out that we should stop passing judgment.
More than 60% of interpersonal communication is spent on people talking how smart, competent or good they are and people talking about how stupid, inept or bad someone else is. What a waste. In a lively workshop we worked on feedforward in stead of feedback.
What really struck me was the simplicity of his statement that behavioral change should focus on just 1 single behavior to change. If you just become a better listener, so many things would improve in your life. Changing behaviors can be daunting because of great pressure it can bring to your life. But just by breaking it down to one single step can bring relief.
He challenged us to pick just one thing that we would like to see changed in our behavior. What would you like to see changed in your behavior?
You can pick up the Dutch version here. English version here.
written by Fokke
\\ tags: Productivity
