Most people at work have a few favorite complaints about meetings.  You
probably have your list and have heard these from others as well:
- They take too long, not a clear agenda, no one cuts long-winded X off
- Meetings take up to big a part of their day, makes it hard to get things
  done
- People go to meetings to have status, something on the schedule, not 
  because they necessarily create value

But at the end of the day, most of us don’t get serious about changing meetings.

Why?  Well its funny, but meetings have been around since all the way back
to Garden - remember that interesting one with God, Adam, Eve and the fig
leaves. Meetings, despite all the problems, meet some important status,
social, comfort and communication needs.  They grease the political wheels
in every corporation I’ve worked with.

Meetings aren’t going away anytime soon.  Even if they are outdated in the
21st century as a way to communicate information, analyze data and make decisions.

So here’s what I thought this week, as I heard one more person talk about
how little people get done at their company… because everyone is attending
meetings all day long.  I think they described their organization as having
a “meeting culture.”

I thought, “What if you don’t improve meetings?”  What if you just leave
them be?  Meetings were around long before I started working, and they will
be here long after I quit working.  If you Google it, the estimates are that
between 11 million and 25 million meetings occur every day in the US alone.

Then I started thinking, what if  you wanted to create this dynamic
interchange between people at work?  What if it had to run at the pace
that everything else is happening?  What if it had to allow people to merge
seamlessly in a conversation,  not have one person at a time consume
large amounts of time?

What if we needed a different image, a different story to approach this type
of interaction.   What if we called them, saw them, operated in them as…
drum roll…. “Roundabouts!”

What if people participated in Roundabout interactions like they do when
driving their car?  I mean no one parks their car in a roundabout, nor do
they endlessly go in circles.  The key is to merge into a fast moving paced
sequence and exit when you don’t need to be there any longer.

What if roundabouts only occur when you need to get people coming from
different vantage points, circling the topic and then redirected in the new
direction?  What if roundabouts couldn’t occur without a convergence,
a decision to be made?  What if Roundabouts were solely focused on
coordinating effort, and getting the input and updates from multiple
people to allow you to make the best decision, and it all had to keep moving.

What if you didn’t sit in a roundabout?  What if you stood up in these
interactions?  What if you had sort of portable lecterns that people
grabbed so they could stand and still work with their notes, type on
their laptop, write on their notepad?

I told my wife that I wanted to go into the business of building portable
Roundabout stands that would fold up in the corner, but then stand up
like music stands, but flat at the top.  She suggested I not got into
manufacturing just yet.  She’s good at discerning enthusiasm and
business demand.  She didn’t write the eBooks on meetings, I did

Bottom Line:

What if we created new rules:
1. Go to meetings to be seen, be heard, be supportive, stay current and
101 other reasons, but if you want to get things done…
2. Go to a Roundabout.  My term, for  a new interaction structure that
supports multiple people rapidly addressing a series of issues, and then
taking off, with the key being concise, short, interactions, spaced exchanges
and clear exits. 

Tell me what you think.

Well, you’ll be a long way forward in this turbulent world if you consider
strategy to be hopelessly riddled with assume.  It’s like they are bed partners,
and you can act like it isn’t true, but every strategy is built on assumptions.

What should you do? 

Some people give up on strategy, just keep doing whatever works, or whatever
their hunch or proclivity is, and hope the “river doesn’t rise” until they make
enough money to get out of the  game.

What should you do?

Yea, what should you do, especially if you would like to be strategic, and not
just do what worked last year, or chase after the opportunity of the moment?

The McKinsey Quarterly produced an article entitled Just-in-Time Strategy
for a Turbulent World, which suggests you can’t know the future, so the best
strategy is to hedge your bets with a portfolio of strategic goals. 

Hedging your bets makes sense anytime you are betting on assumptions, but
when I read this,  I know what most corporate leaders do with this message.
That’s right, they assume, they’ve got the risk managed with multiple options.

So let me be clearer about what dealing realistically with the reality of assumptions
being in bed with your strategy.  It’s all about the need to check.  The article
in McKinsey describes it with the phrase, “Rigorous monitoring is crucial”, but
I don’t think that gets to an emotional level that connects.  So let me frame
it a different way.

Imagine if you are a guy, and you’re wearing pants that have a zipper that
has been previously known to slip, in fact it has already slipped once today
and someone snickered.  Would you check?  Of course you would.
Regularly.

Or if you are a woman and you’re wearing a low cut top, do you check to see
that everything is in place and not slipped?  You bet.

So we are used to handling some risks by checking regularly, especially if there’s 
a risk of personal embarrassment.

Transfer that same feeling, that same sense of possible embarrassment and sense
of exposure, to your strategy and suddenly you have a whole new perspective
on what it means to have a strategic plan.  It’s something you need to check
on repeatedly and respond if something has slipped!

That’s the correct perspective to have when it comes to strategy.   That’s
my translation of McKinsey’s statment, “The hallmark of this approach
is the willingness to change direction continually as more and more distinct
knowledge appears.”

BTW, the McKinsey article has a few suggestions worth reviewing, but for a
specific “do these four steps” grab my simple ebook on how to create and
manage a strategic plan.  You can get it here -http://rodneybrim.com/info/ebooks 
and find out why the 4 key components are 1. Relevance, 2. Actionated,
3. Reviewed via Metrics and 4. the Right technology to link strategy to
the front lines.

Bottom Line:
A strategy is at best a set of assumptions about an uncertain future.  Reduce
your risk of having the wrong strategy by diversifying, and by repeatedly
checking with the willingess to shut down and start anew, when the results
aren’t there.  For most of us the biggest change is to form the habit of checking,
and then checking again.  Just think about zippers and you’ll get better at
checking in 2012.

Links:
Reviving Your Strategic Plan
Strategic Planning Leadership

An article in 2008 on “Why You Need Quiet Time“  covered some of
the health benefits, including strengthening parts of the brains
that would normally decline with aging.  Yes I need that, being a boomer.

But the thought I wanted you to chew on was Rikki Fowler’s
statement in the article, “”Silence allows the creative process.
It’s giving the right mind space, so it can say its piece.”

What if this year you need to be more creative than you ever
have been before?  What if business as usual is not in your best interest?
What if creativity is your CRITICAL SUCCESS factor this year? 
Would you properly resource it, make sure it was emphasized?

What if a lot of the old rules, especially financial ones, don’t work so
well?  Maybe your job is uncertain, your house, previously heralded
as the investment that you couldn’t go wrong with, is now under water?
The future looks uncertain.

What if it isn’t new year business as usual this January.  You know set
new goals, dust off the strategic plan, get down to business and crank…

What if more then ever, it was critical to take some time
and stop
and be Quiet,
because it’s time to pay attention and be creative. 

Maybe we all share a lot in common with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz,
and we’re realizing more than ever that “Toto, I don’t think we’re in
Kansas anymore.”  Life isn’t looking as familiar as usual.

A recent article my friend Greg Vilkin sent me, The Joy of Quiet,
does a great job of reminding us that in one generation we have
gone from gaining greater and greater access to information,
instant access, to overwhelm and the need to unplug.

One casualty of being plugged in all the time, is that we lose
time to be quiet, which is a prerequisite for being plugged into
ourself.  The quote from Michael maller, from a half century ago, is
even more valid today, as he warned, “When things come at you very
fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.”

So beyond the health of your brain and other organs, maybe there’s
a lot of good reasons to make sure you get some quiet time regularly
as this new year kicks off.  Here’s a couple of recommendations to consider:

Recommendations:

1. Take some time to be quiet and listen to yourself.  We all need listening
     to be able to connect, including connecting with our self.
2. Listen to the conversation going on in your head. 
    Listen to the rules you’ve made up for your self about life.
    Listen to the promises you’ve made to your self.  
    It all needs some attending, and quite possible creative new approaches 
    and options.
3. Finally, if you’re like me, put the quiet time on your calendar, otherwise
    it gets nudged out by all the sound and commotion around.  If you don’t
    block it out… it won’t happen.

Have a creative, blessed, tremendous year in 2012 and guard your
quiet time, there’s treasures in that space.

For those of you who don’t have the time to load and watch the video,
Utta starts by underscoring using familiar SMART goal criteria for
getting in shape and accomplishing other goals.

She references the need for goals to be believeable, broken down into
concrete, acheivable, sub goals or milestones, and tied to specific
measurement points, e.g. translate “I’m going to get in shape” to “I’m
going to lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks.” 

All probably stuff you are familiar with, but here’s the sleeper.

When she talks about running she lights up, she’s talking about something
she enjoys and she let’s all of us in on a little, well big, secret. 
FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT FUN.

What if that’s the key to every change moving forward.  Maybe the
word fun is to limiting, but we all need to find a way to make it pay-off,
to make it rewarding… but get this… along the way, not just at the end. 

Ah, so if you set out to accomplish something, and you don’t find a
way to make it anything but a grueling endurance process, your
likelihood of seeing it through to the end drops like a rock. 

Got it.  

Hey let me extend that concept just a bit more for you, especially as
it relates to the world of work.

I am convinced that for people to be high performers at work they
consistently need 4 things, just like every high performance athlete.
Watch what’s 4th on the list, it may surprise you.

1. We all need a game plan, what’s next, what works, what’s critical
2. We all need a scoreboard, some way to tell if we are getting ahead
     or falling behind
3. We all need a game clock, some way to tell how much time we have
     left to work with.

and then there’s number 4.

4. We all need recognition.   We’ll all need a pay-off.  You do, I do,
and that can include a number of things, but funny enough getting
recognized by someone you trust and value, often stays with us the
longest.

Bottom Line:
To achieve goals there are a pretty consistent set of criteria that work, called
SMART.  To play at a high level in the world of work, we need a similar
framework, including a game plan, a game scoreboard and a game clock…
but just as much as anything else we need a pay-off that ultimately hinges
on recognition.  Are you getting enough recognition?  Do you take
advantage of giving it to others and in so doing supporting them playing
at a high level?  Let me know.

Links:
Working Strategically and the 3 Legged Stool of Outcome, Game Clock & Value
Most of What You Have Read about Smart Goals is Wrong

Well first let me tell you what was the 3rd most frequently cited pain:
#3 – Overwhelmed by incoming email and trying to use it to manage
people, but still not able to get updates in a timely manner.  Sound familiar?

And #2 – Linking work effort to a plan, particularly a strategic plan.
“ Once strategic goals are set or projects launched, it is difficult to identify
and track what the action plan is and how it is progressing.  And if it isn’t
progressing well, to have the data available to determine what the
course correction should be.”

Have we covered what you thought was going to be #1 yet?  Here it is,
the #1 most commonly reported pain in managing people, is

“Getting people to spend a bigger % of their time generating
revenue, getting done what’s important.”

So why do we get so little productive time out of employees? 
Here’s some thoughts about the reasons why:

1. Being too responsive to email.  Yes I said, “too responsive”. 
Whether that’s checking frequently, or worse, getting notified as
soon as you have new email… it all creates a gigantic interruption
to staying focused on getting done what’s important.  Check out
this bit of statistics.  Bottom line, if you check email hourly or 8
times a day, you’re losing 2 hours of productivity…
after you finish the email.  Yikes.

In 2007, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average,
15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, such as
writing reports or computer code, after dealing with incoming
email. They wandered off to reply to other messages or browse
the Web.  New York Times, 3/25/2007

2.  70% of us are working harder, but on what?  The Houston
Business Journal, 2/27/2006 reported that “In general, a third
of all American workers could be viewed as chronically
overworked.” Check out these two data points:

Are you too overworked to focus on your job?
Yes, 62.8%; Sometimes, 23%; No, 14.2%.  
Boston.com Internet poll, Spring 2005

71% of white-collar workers feel stressed about the amount
of information they must process and act on while doing business;
60% feel overwhelmed.   Institute of the Future, Menlo Park, CA

It looks like we are working harder and longer, but not at
what generates revenue, but at managing information and our
access to others, with all the interruption that creates in our
work flow.  We’re overworked… but get this, not focused on
our job.  So what are most people focused on, if not their job?
Fill in the blank, but I bet if you look it will be off managing the
next crisis, the next email, the next request, attending the next
meeting… you get the point.

It’s very apparent that working on what generates revenue is no
match in competing for out attention with the incoming email, IMs,
text messaging and meeting time on our schedule.  Time to spend
on priorities, on what moves the business concretely forward, just
loses over and over when it comes to a battle for our time and attention.

Guess what?… I going to get to a suggestion about how you can
change the game.

Part of the reason that time generating revenue gets de-prioritized,
is that most of us on any given day, don’t have a set of “move the
business forward” priorities. 

Guess what else?  Most people don’t naturally create that set of
priorities for themselves.  If you manage people, you have to.

Well actually you don’t have to, and you may in fact have all sorts
of reasons why “you shouldn’t have to,” but in fact if you want to
change the game, if you want to have your direct reports spend
more time on what will generate revenue, you have to make the
priorities really explicit.

You not only have to make priorities really clear, each day,
 you have to have a system for them to easily respond to the
priorities… so that you can easily check to see if they got done. 
(Yes you have to check, to follow-up, otherwise the request or
deliverable loses intensity as a priority.)

Are you yelling, “No, it can’t be!” yet?  Most managers I know
don’t want to spend even a few minutes a day setting priorities
with their direct reports.

Bottom Line:
If you are in a management position, if you have to get work done
through others, than you’ll probably resonate with what we found
to be the biggest pain in the process, and that’s getting people to
spend a bigger % of their day on what generates revenue. 

In order to change the game, to get a bigger % of time spent on
what’s important, you have to reduce access to information
process (emails, IM, time spent in meetings), and increase the
vividness of today’s priorities… for each person you manage.
BTW, there is no better program that I have found to manage
people, than ManagePro.    The ability to see the whole field,
all the projects, but then in one click to see what the person
walking through the door is responsible for and what they’ve
accomplished to date (including what they have done on
what you assigned them)… is priceless.

Well, actually here’s the 15 second sound byte first.
      On the road to improvement, 
      we encounter what we are adverse to address,  
      yet it turns out that addressing what we wish to avoid
      … is key to improvement.

So here’s how it started. Well at least most recently.  First I get
Patrick Lencioni (author of books like the Death of Meetings,
and 5 Dysfunctions of Team), latest blog talking about “sins of
omission” in the organization.  Here’s a brief quote:

“See, in most organizations, the biggest problems arise not because
leaders are actively promoting the wrong behavior, but rather
because they’re passively doing so by allowing people to get away
with this behavior without impunity.

The most common reason that leaders commit sins of omission is
simply because they just don’t feel comfortable confronting people
about what they are or are not doing. Instead, they look the other
way and hope that the problem goes away… This is a moment of
great humility. And a moment of truth.”

OK, first gut check.  Are you, like most people, adverse to giving
feedback, does it make you uncomfortable, do you avoid it?
… do you get the “clutchy feeling” and look for a hole in the floor?
… especially if the person is likely to get defensive?

I think the answer is, the world over… ABSOLUTELY. 
What was your answer? _____________

So then I get another email from a CEO who said that he got
too busy to deploy ManagePro, where ManagePro represented
his intention to get his organization to improve, progress, and be
better at delivering accountable results.

What was quite obvious, is that being busy, was correct, but only
partially so.  What was really happening was that along the
road to his best intentions, some members of his management
team resisted, even defied his intent to improve things, and he
stopped the process, in this case deploying ManagePro, so that
he wouldn’t have to confront members of his team.

OK, second gut check.  Do  you, like this CEO, stop short of
improving things if it means you have to confront people
on dysfunctional behavior at work?

Again, I think the answer is, the world over… ABSOLUTELY.
What was your answer?_____

Yes confronting stuff that doesn’t work is not fun.  It makes a
majority of people turn the other way… or tip toe out of the room.
However it is a necessary part, right along with affirming what is
working, to succeeding on the path to improvement.

What’s obvious in our business is people buy ManagePro explicitly with the
intent of using it to improve their organization.  You know, hopefully get
rid of or around the effects of those behaviors we are adverse to address. 
Instead, deploying ManagePro seems to make those dysfunctional attitudes
and behaviors all the more obvious, as you create a transparent platform,
for documenting plans, follow through and results.  Oh boy.  Now what are
you going to do?

Bottom Line:
So here’s what I would like you to consider.  On behalf of the survi-
vability of your own aspirations, on behalf of the healthiness of the
organization you invest your life working at, on behalf of just a
healthier world… steel your nerves, uncurl your toes, keep breathing
and start to tell a little more truth about what works and doesn’t at
work.  We’ll all enjoy work more if we do.

I’m guessing what you are thinking, and actually you just missed it.  What? 
Go back, before the meeting and let me show  you something I’ve learned.

Have  you noticed how that saying things concisely is not a skill or
talent liberally given to all?  OK, that registers, right?

How about this one.  Have you noticed the number of people that feel
the need to say a point two or three times before finishing? 

What’s with that?  I’ll explain in second, but the point I wanted to make is
very few people efficiently present, discuss and conclude in a concise manner. 

OK, so people aren’t concise.  But that’s only part of it.  But let’s just guess
for a moment.  Does that mean most people take let’s say 3x to make
presentation or a point in a meeting, as it should take if they were concise?
You got it.  Did you notice the 3x?  That’s a big difference, but there’s more.

Let’s say someone is relatively concise and they get through what they want
to say in one pass.  Let’s say they talk for 5 minutes to present their point. 
That would be roughly 1 to 1.5 pages of information if they were to write it out.
Do you know how long it takes you to read  a page to a page and a half?  It
takes approximately 1 minute. 

So let’s add this up.  By being verbally tangential and/or repetitive, most people
use 3 times the amount of meeting time that should be required to present
a point.  And, get this – if they were to write it out, it would actually take 1/5
the time to read as they are requiring time on the meeting floor.

Those are big numbers.  1/3 the time.  1/5 the time.  What if those were
additive?  Let see if it normally requires me 10 minutes to talk through
a point, then if I was really concise I might get that to 3 minutes, but
actually if I printed it out, it would only require the other participants
a minute or less to come up to speed.  From 10 minutes to 1 minute.

So what’s the catch?   Why doesn’t everyone submit their topic, the facts,
what they want, etc. in writing? 

Big drum roll…………  How would you fill that in?  Remember this could
mean you will get through that meeting at 4pm or much sooner.  So don’t
dodge.

The answer, like most things in the world, is that nothing is free, especially
higher performance and in the case of meetings it means that people
have to spend more time preparing for the meeting, instead of showing up
and winging it, joining the discussion… oh boy here we go again.

Ok, so tip 13b is succintly this… -  Have people present their topic
in a written form and save the dialogue for Q&A, discussion and final decisions.

But wait a moment, doesn’t that mean everyone who presents will have
to spend more time getting ready for a meeting?  Yes it does.  And let’s
look at the math on that one as well.  If it takes you an hour to write up
your presentation, which moves your presentation from the 10 minute
meeting spot mentioned above to a 1 minute read and let’s say there are
10 people in the meeting. 

If I’m that presenter it took one hour out of my schedule, but I saved
the group of 10, 9 minutes.  So I traded 60 minutes of preparation for an
90 minutes of savings in the meeting.  I’m still up, even though the
number’s don’t as overwhelmingly attractive.  Actually John Tropman,
in his book, Making Meetings Work, reports the average is more like two
to one.  Two hours of savings for every one hour spent in meeting preparation. 

There’s a host of other benefits from having the initial presentation for each
agenda topic written out.  Better focus, better outcomes, better meeting
process… I could go on, buy you are probably already ahead of me.

Oh, and that point about why do people say things 2 – 3 times.  It actually
has a number of roots.  Sometimes it’s a:
- Comfort thing, they keep reworking the material until they feel comfortable
they not left anything out… that you understand,
- Control thing, I’m going to hold the floor awhile, I kinda like it,
- Waiting for the brain to catch up, repeating is a way to allow the brain to
catch up and figure out what we’re going to say next or be asked next.
There are a lot more possibilities, but that’s three I commonly see.

Bottom Line:
One especially effective way to reduce the time spent in your next meetings
is to require participants to submit the presentation (on the screen via a
projector or printed, either is fine) in a written instead of verbal form.

Links:
Take a look at the ebooks and video’s I have on Creating Meetings that
Take Half the Time and are Twice as Effective at my new site
http://www.RodneyBrim.com

When it comes to meetings we read/think Agenda, and only assume
the Outcome.  Actually it turns out that there’s a lot of diverse definitions
floating around amongst participants in most meetings when it comes to
defining Outcome.

It’s one of the reasons the average meeting  is so much less than it could
be.  That’s right, not having a defined, shared outcome, is one
of the reasons most meetings aren’t very efficient, and why I’m
able to teach people  how to lead meetings that take half the time pretty
easily.  Stay with me and I’ll explain how that ties into Outcome and one
thing you can do to turn around the very next meeting you are leading…
for the better.

First the rap on meetings.  Most meetings consume a minimum of twice
the time resources necessary to process the information being discussed. 
During that extra 50% of the time used, most people feel a sense of boredom,
tedium or frustration… certainly not entertainment – hence the tendency
to multi-task during meetings. 

Additionally meetings also don’t generate effective long term output, so
they and the information in them, has to be recycled, repeated multiple
times.  If meetings were compared to any other resource, they would be
rated as being incredibly time consuming, and costly, for the value
generated.  Typically the amount of time lost in a single meeting is the
equivalent of a whole day’s productivity for a member of the team. Ouch!

OK, so what does that have to do with Outcome and why draw the
distinction between agenda and outcome?  Let me share with you my
top 3 functions that Outcome plays in a meeting. 

1. Without a Defined Outcome, the meeting doesn’t have a reference to
determine value.  Where do you, where does the group, expect to get, and
what tangibles do they expect to have by the end of the meeting? 
Meetings suffer when they don’t have a responsibility to reach an outcome.

2. A Defined Outcome is not only the destination; it is a course
correcting reference process throughout the meeting.  It’s the
first decision point for whom to include in a meeting.   It should be the
hidden value-add question in your mind for every conversation…
e.g. “Is this discussion going to help us get to our defined outcome?” 
It is the guide that helps you make effective trade-offs  on how to spend
time throughout the meeting.

3. The Defined Outcome is the basis for creating an Agenda, as
the Agenda essentially represents the topics that need to be addressed
to reach your intended Outcome.  Think of your agenda as simply the
work plan to reach the Outcome.  Defining the Outcome is essential for
defining Who is going to attend; What’s going to be addressed; and
When you make course corrections in each and every meeting.

Bottom Line: Establishing a defined and shared outcome across the
participants for every meeting is a critical starting point and alignment
guide for every business meeting you lead.  And it is lacking as
an active, in your face, resource for a majority of business meetings.
Don’t let it be in yours.

Here’s two tips:
1. Go watch a free 10 minute video I’ve put on on using Outcomes
in Meetings you can get access to it by signing up on this page
http://rodneybrim.com/info/video

2.  Go read an ebook on the topic and other keys to creating
great meetings that I’ve made available for free at
http://rodneybrim.com/info/ebooks

Top or First in Your Mind:

Here’s the first working premise:
1.Whatever you put first or at the top of your mind’s focus,
2. you end up spending time resources on
(you literally buy with seconds from your life), and you do so
3. becomes it’s at the top (foremost in your attention),
4. not because it is the most valuable.

Ries and Trout gave an interesting twist to the concept of what’s first in your
mind when they wrote about it years ago in their 22 Immutable Laws of
Marketing.  Their first law is that it is better to be first (into a market) then
“better”.   We now know that that’s more accurate when defining the initial
cycle in a market…often better catches up and suplants first, ex. “Apple’s
iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it beat out the ones that came before it. 
But what if that applies to your brain and how you personally manage
information?  I think it does.

Let me restate it another way (ultimately it will be better when you put it into
your own words).  You might want to think about what you let in to occupy
your top of mind thought process.  Be careful what you raise to the top
of your attention list, it eats your resources, regardless of
whether or not it is valuable.

So think about this, you’re working on something important, should you keep
checking your email to see if anything has come in (e.g. replace top of mind)?

Should you keep listening for the sound of incoming tweets, IMs, how about
Outlook’s display of the Desktop Alert? 

What’s your answer?  Having lots of availability, turns out to mean, in part,
that you have lots of opportunities to replace what’s first in your mind, over
and over again throughout the day.  Does it work for you? 

The answer is no, probably not.  It would be like drawing a hand of cards,
and someone keeps changing one of your cards as you’re trying to work out
a strategy.  Ultimately you would get access (view) to a lot of cards, but it
would be very slow going in terms of putting together a strategy.  So there’s
something about fixing the card deck and not reshuffling or drawing that
can be important at times.

Actually, if you can tolerate being focused, not introducing
something “new” to your attention scan, to the number one spot
in your deck, it makes completing almost any project easier and quicker to
complete. 

So be careful about how accessible you make the number 1 spot in your
immediate focus.  Look around your desk, your monitor, I bet there’s some
distractions you have lying about that are just waiting to grab the #1 spot,
even though they can’t justify it based on value.

This brings up the issue of multi-tasking.  Actually lately it seems multi-
tasking gets a bad wrap.  I just got another email for a course So You
Think You Can Multitask: in which Dr. Joanne Cantor is to demonstrate
just how inept your brain is at multitasking, how information overload
reduces your creativity, and how recent brain research shows that constant
connectivity to our devices is antithetical to doing good work.

OK, that all makes sense.  I don’t deny that multi-tasking (trading multiple
topics through your Number 1 brain space in rotation) can prevent you from
having access to the kind of focus you need for some, maybe even a lot of,
tasks.  But actually most executives I know, multi-task rather successfully
off and on all day long.  So how do they get away with it?

Get this – the key is to to have different gears, to be able to switch,
to treat your mind like a transmission.  Sometimes  you shift into multi-
tasking, and when the road warrants it, you then switch to another gear,
maybe a lower gear, let’s call that single tasking.  The key is - How easily
can your brain process the tasks(s) you are working on.  If you can do it in
your sleep, you have a lot of extra neurons waiting around for something else
to do.  If it’s very challenging, better put your calls on hold, your IM on
Out of Office, and turn off the mail notification, #1 in your brain needs to be
reserved for all of your undistracted focus.

The key is actively matching your mental gearing or single vs multi-tasking to
the task demands, as opposed to what other people demand of you, or perhaps
what your preferred pattern is.

It’s an interesting process isn’t it?  Looking at what drives us, or should drive
us to place a task in the #1 spot on our attention list, and how much effort we
put in place to protect it in that spot… versus almost invite any intrusion. 
Maybe I should retitle this blog the lost art of creating and working priority 1. 
I certainly see that reflected any many ManagPro company portfolio’s I get
exposed to, and how how they have far too many items designated as Priority
one, then they can possibly focus on effectively.

Bottom Line:
#1 in our focus, our attention, our brain, is a very important place.  On some
level we put off everything else in deference to what’s #1.  So be careful.
Guard the number one spot from distractions you have control over,
including an array of collaboration tools. 

And be sensitive to the tasks you’re engaging in, and get heads up about
switching from multi-tasking to single-tasking when the value/challenge
/immediacy of the tasks requires it.  You’ll like the results and your brain
will thank you for it.  Is that possible?  It sounded good when I wrote it, so
I’m leaving it in.;) 

But honestly what do you need to do to make this all work better starting
tomorrow?  I start by  confirming my priorities are value-based, then
“landing” my priorities on my ManagePro calendar and blocking out time. 
They aren’t really number 1 if they don’t get priority on my schedule. 
How about you?

We could probably all profit from a regular review or tune-up of how
we manage our thought process, especially as it applies to our time spent
at work.  But that’s  not where this blog is leading, although it wouldn’t be
a bad blog to go explore that concept.

Since I started consulting with ManagePro 18 years ago, I have been
talking to people about getting stuff out of their head and into ManagePro
so that they have more head room to be creative.  Our minds are not that
great at storing lots of todos, plus it creates a lot of clutter.  I noticed
in a blog this morning that David Allen is saying the same thing.

First question, Do you think that revealing the concept of getting the details
out of your head and into a larger system changes the way people operate?
The concept that it will better leverage the details and follow-through, while
creating more brain space to be creative or create a higher level of value?

I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and said, “Thank you
so much for sharing that concept, that has totally transformed the way
I handle the small stuff and my resulting creativity has just gone through
the roof.”    NOT!  It doesn’t work that way!  Or rather it hasn’t for me. 

Stay with me, I’m getting to the point (probably doesn’t seem like it),
but this one has a bit of detour. Actually I’m stepping around several
thoughts my head would like to point out, and my fingers type, but
I’m stearing this blog back to how you and I think… and specifically
how to influence that process.

David proposes a structure (Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do),
in his Getting Things Done methodology which is a good one, but again
nothing really earth shaking.  But I began to think, if you don’t
operate that way in your head, then why would you operate
that way with tasks coming across your desk?

David made a comment at the end of his last newsletter, “If you think
unruly and unfocused committees in your company or your community
can be a frustrating waste of time, try the one in your head.”

Then this interesting connection went together in my head.  It started
with thinking about an ebook I recently published, actually three, on
creating high value business meetings, and in the 2nd book on Process,
I talk about the fact that meetings work best when you steer the
participants to interact in a repeated 4 step cycle or dance of:
     1. Recognition (what’s next, how much time,
what’s the value, where are we?)
     2. Report (let’s get the facts, the status,
the problem, accurately and concisely)
     3. Review (what are we going to do with those facts,
implications & next steps)
     4. Re-create (do those facts represent possible
opportunities and options if we get creative about how we constuct them?)

There’s some parallels between the structure I advocate in groups or meetings
and David’s GTD process.  But here’s the thing.

To have effective meetings, the leader has to adopt an active stance in
steering the group through this 4 step sequence on each major
agenda item. If the leader doesn’t actively steer the process, the process
get’s steered by all sorts of other factors.  Predictably.
Ready for the big insight?

OK, here’s the payoff for staying with me (drum roll)..
>>> IT”S THE SAME IN YOUR HEAD.
If you don’t actively steer the process your mind uses to manage all
that stuff whirling around inside, it gets steered by all sorts of other
factors and stimuli.

Get it?  You have to be much more active with your thought process,
than you (or I) realized, if you are intending to change the value you create
with your time.  Simply reading, simply buying new technology, simply
attending a seminar… none of those things can do the one thing you need
to do, and that is actively take charge of how you manage the internal
conversation and focusing process in your head.

And you manage a new process best by employing a new structure.
One that has time limits and steps to it.  One that you use today, tomorrow,
the day after that, and the next day after that as well, until the new structure
gets woven into your thought process as “the way to do things.”

Bottom Line:
Most of us have an internal thought and organization process that’s as
inefficient as the last meeting we were just grumbling about attending.
You can change that, but to do so you have to take an active stance
in the process, exactly like you need to do when managing a meeting
for high value.  You don’t need to control the process, as much as you
need to steer it and apply/adhere to a new struture or process. 
Check out my short ebooks on meeting process and
you’ll understand better what I’m talking about.

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