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Time-Management-and-Meetings.md

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Time Management and Meetings

Meetings

  • 6 Steps to Running the Perfect 30-Minute Meeting - by Jimmy Sjölund. Takeaways: People tend to "default" to 60-minute meetings, but most meetings rarely require this much time. Sjölund offers six suggestions for trimming meetings to a more managemable and appropriate length while simulatenously making them more effective.

  • Declutter Your Meetings and Create Minimum Viable Meetings - by Zenkara. Takeaway: Run Minimum Viable Meetings, which include the absolute fewest participants with only critical topics for meeting objectives. "Schedule the fewest meetings possible and as early as possible; have the result and outcome that you are satisfied with."

  • Gossip, Rumors, and Lies - by Michael Lopp. Takeaways: What are the right reasons to have meetings, how to provide important structure, and the importance of settings an agenda.

  • How I Share Information with My Team - by Mike McGarr. Takeaways: Team meetings aren't the only way to spread information to the group.

  • Run Your Meetings Like a Boss - by David Fallarme. Takeaways: Make decisions using data, keep meetings to the necessary size, and be prepared with questions and answers to ensure a meeting is productive.

  • Seven Helpful Tips to Ruin a Meeting – What Not to Do to Run Effective Meetings - by Simon Cockayne. Takeaway: Avoid back-to-back scheduling; unclear purpose; lack of preparation; multitasking; personality-based judging of ideas; running over time; zero followup.

  • Start Every Meeting with a Personal Check-in - by Mathias Meyer. Takeaway: the Travis CI CEO talks about how meditation has enhanced his ability to be present, and how this carries into team meetings. "Before you walk into a meeting (virtually or into the meeting room), close your eyes, inhale three times, and walk in. I found that this can have a great impact on my presence and focus in meetings." The team starts meetings with the red/yellow/green scale and everyone states how they're feeling.

Time Management

  • Being Busy Is Now a Status Symbol — and That Needs to Stop - by Frank Kalman. Takeaway: Mostly geared toward an American audience, the article questions the trend toward bragging about having no time and filling one's schedule—counterproductive given stress, health issues, burnout, and other negative side effects. "Yes, working hard is important. But at what point does it become unproductive to constantly seek to be the most productive?"

  • Busy to Death - by Barry O'Reilly. Takeaway: "Over-optimizing for executing work is dangerous. Actually, it’s very dangerous indeed as it causes us to get stuck in plan-do-plan-do cycles. We compromise reflection, retrospection, and review of the outcomes of all the output we are creating. We stop building learning loops into our work to plan-do-check-act the results of all this effort. We don’t allow time to study, consider, or understand if the result of all this activity is actually aligned to what we are hoping to achieve. We are frankly too busy to."

  • Data Driven Time Management - By Noah Kagan at Sumo. Takeaway: Measure your time and then use that data to decide how you really want to be spending your time. This does not just mean office time!

  • Focus – keynote at AgileByExample, Warsaw - by Henrik Kniberg. Takeaway: Focus on extracting more value from your available time. “Busy-ness” is an artificial concept. Build in slack to your schedule to achive better focus.

  • The Habit of No - by Ethan Austin. The habit of saying no is important for teamwork and keeping a startup focused on the common goal.

  • Listening Is the Job - by Andrew Bosworth. Takeaway: Have a system for taking in/consuming information; maximize signal-to-noise ratio; give feedback; proactively identify gaps in your information flows; write notes to remember reactions you have through the day; tell your story; be clear about the information you seek; and listen.

  • Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule - by Y Combinator's Paul Graham. Takeaway: The manager's schedule is typically in one-hour blocks, while the maker's schedule requires longer stretches of uninterrupted time. "Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in."

  • Manage Your Day-to-Day - by Seth Godin, Dan Ariely, Gretchen Rubin, Erin Rooney Doland, and other contributors. The book shows you how to stop letting other people run your schedule; find the right recharge/productivity balance; optimize digital communications/social media use, and more.

  • The Management Technique Essential to Google’s Growth - by Blake Thorne. Takeaways: On the potential benefits of open office hours and how to make them work.

  • No "Yes." Either "HELL YEAH!" or "No" - by Derek Sivers. Takeaways: If you are overcommitted, recalibrate when you say yes. Saying "no" more gives you more time to say "HELL YEAH!" for things that are really important to you.

  • Product Strategy Means Saying No - by Intercom. Takeaways: Review common reasons for making product decisions and ask whether they are actually good for the product.

  • Reducing Hours by Focusing your Job - by Natalie Nagele. Takeaway: How to use a mindmap plus the 30-60-90 plan to clarify the focus of your role, plus what to prioritize. Can be a great exercise to do with your team.

  • On Better Meetings - by Lara Hogan. Takeaways: Productive meetings come from doing the right amount of work before, during, and after a meeting.

  • Three P’s of Prioritizing - by the John Maxwell Company. Takeaway: If you are feeling crunched for time, reevaluate your priorites. The three Ps are Private Time, Production Time, and People Time.

  • The Top 5 Productivity Mistakes - by Ramit Sethi. Takeaways: Talks about the psychology of being unproductive, and how changing the narrative can achive big breakthroughs.

  • “Vacations are for the Weak” - by Seth Bannon. Takeaway: "Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job. Sleep and exercise help, but occasional extended breaks are essential too, and their benefits on creativity, productivity, and happiness are well documented."

  • What You Don't Know About Management - How to Take Back Your Workday - by Janet Choi and Walter Chen at iDoneThis. A longer read that starts with self-managing your own success and covers how to manage people more effectively, as well as effective meeting tips.

  • Why Work Doesn't Happen at Work - by Jason Fried @ TedXMidwest. Takeaways: Interruptions are toxic, and make workers have to restart. Work to reduce syncronous communication in order to free up employees to have more uninterrupted productive time.