Sometimes our post will arise from a skill we already have and want to share; sometimes it’s from a wish to learn something new so you can learn it too. Often, we’re inspired by talented bloggers who generously share their ideas and their uplifting spirits. We want to highlight a few of our favorites in this post — and what more appropriate time to show our gratitude than the week of Thanksgiving?

3 Blogs That Inspire Us

1. Speaking About Presenting: Lena and I presented a workshop at a conference last month. We started our rehearsal by checking out Olivia Mitchell’s great advice on effective presentations. (A “hat tip” to our colleague Joan Starr for introducing us to this blog). This is a rich resource of public speaking skills that new and experienced presenters can both utilize. We happily absorbed her confidence-building advice about How to Look Authoritative When You Feel Anything But.

2. Innovate on Purpose by Jeffrey Phillips is dedicated to ideas, conversations and approaches for sustainable, repeatable workplace innovation. His advice is eminently practical in its focus on creating a culture of innovation over the long term. We were particularly struck by his recent post explaining the importance of finding the right people to innovate and getting them into the right roles.

3. Pick the Brain is a blog about self-improvement — personal productivity, motivation, and self-education. A small team of experts provides advice that is great for the workplace but also works well in many facets of our lives. Lori Taylor’s recent advice about How To Stop Focusing On People & Focus On Issues (It’s Easy If You Do This) gave me a path forward in a sticky situation.

Now It’s Your Turn

What blogs do you follow (besides this one, of course)? Share your inspirations in the comment section below!

For more about what inspires us to blog and how we choose our topics, see our interview in University of California’s LINK newsletter.

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Last week, Leslie outlined the basics on managing meetings in her post on How to Host an Effective Virtual Meeting. This week, we’ll narrow our focus to a few easy ways to capture what really matters in your meetings — critical decisions, actions, and next steps. If you absolutely need a literal record of who said what, consider doing a voice recording or video of your meeting. (Most conferencing software products offer recordings as an option at a small additional fee.)

Try one or more of these tips for your own note taking:

3 Tips for Taking Simple & Effective Notes at Meetings

1. Type the notes during the the meeting. It takes a little practice, but it’s much more efficient. Use a numbered agenda as the starting point and capture action items and brief notes under each numbered agenda item. The benefit is combining the agenda and notes in a single document (that’s one less document to keep track of), and best of all, your note-taking duties are done when the meeting’s done.
2. Keep the notes as brief as possible. Only capture what’s most critical. Too much typing can be distracting. Record decisions and actions. Avoid statements like “discussed [fill in the blank] topic.” This is not informative. Was a decision made? What action will be taken? What was the upshot of the discussion?
3. Save the meeting notes in a shared space like a wiki page or a shared document in Google Docs for easy access and editing.  In the past, you had to distribute the notes to meeting participants and then collate everyone’s changes. This was time-consuming and a poor use of everyone’s time. Today, you can have participants edit directly in a shared document (and one that will even show you the revision history.)

Example of An Agenda and Notes

This approach may sound simplistic, yet it’s effective and fast. With the time you save, you can devote your energy to making sure meeting participants know what they have agreed to do and what their deadlines are.  A simple way to do this is to create a table at the top of your meeting notes that pulls out this important information.  Here are the essentials to track:

• Who is responsible.
• What is the action.
• When is it due.
• It’s useful to have a general Notes column for brief comments or status updates.

Example of An Action Table

Your action table might look something like this:

Be sure to get your team’s agreement in advance before trying these methods. Find out how much context you are expected to record about decisions, actions, issue background, etc. For example, do you need a record of whose idea it was and what the alternative ideas were, or is it sufficient to simply record the final decision? Talk with your team and manager beforehand.

“A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted.” – James T. Kirk (12 Leadership Lessons From the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise)

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Briefly skim these articles:

How to Record Useful Meeting Minutes

4 Top Tips on How to Take Meeting Minutes

2. Read our previous post How to Embrace Innovation for why it’s good to share meeting notes on a screen during the meeting (see “Start with a Simple Innovation”).

What Method Works for You?

Do you have a favorite method for taking notes or tips you’d like to share? We’d love to hear them. Send an email to us at yourlifeatwork@gmail.com or comment below.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

How to Manage a Virtual Meeting

1. Before the Meeting

• Send an agenda in advance. If it’s a lengthy meeting with many people attending, your agenda should also list the timing and outcomes (or objectives) for each agenda item. If you don’t know why you are holding this meeting — don’t hold it. It’s your job to make sure people don’t waste their time. Your advanced preparation shows respect to the participants and to the organization.
• Appoint a backup facilitator and review the agenda with them. Make sure they know the host code to your conference call or virtual meeting software, so they can run the meeting if you are absent.
• Practice with the technology. Most companies have a favored software for webinars, online demonstrations, and web-based meetings. Make sure you can navigate confidently and use the features you need for your meeting. And prepare some contingency plans, because invariably the technology will fail you at a key moment. Best advice: talk to an experienced web presenter in your office and learn their technique.

2. At the Beginning

• Be there early (in the room, on the phone, and online) so you can boot up and test — there’s nothing worse than watching and listening as someone fumbles with the technology; you can feel the energy dissipate before the meeting even starts.
• Greet each arrival as they “beep in” to a phone meeting by asking, “Hi, who just joined the call?”
• When everyone is assembled, introduce the attendees and their roles. Make sure everyone knows why they are at this meeting.

3. During the Meeting

• Begin the meeting on time, and don’t start over for late-comers. It is unfair to the people who make an effort to arrive on time, and it stops the meeting dead in its tracks. Add a note to the agenda that late-comers should wait for the facilitator to check for new attendees (perhaps at the 15-minute mark).
• Do not multi-task. You will quickly lose focus and lose control of the meeting. You already have a big job: watch the clock, take brief notes, and make sure the discussion is moving. Your goal is to help the group reach a specific objective or outcome they need to move forward, so keep your eye on the ball.
• Keep the pace lively. You don’t have the luxury of visual cues the way you might with an in-person meeting (cues like sighing, eye-rolling, doodling, dozing, etc.), so be sensitive to pacing and don’t let the air leak out of the meeting.
• If you are sharing your desktop as a presenter, avoid excessive scrolling, sudden rapid cursor movements or jumping too quickly between pages; it can be disorienting for viewers.
• Make sure everyone gets their say. Keep track of who is not participating and call on them periodically in a gentle way. You can ask: “How might this apply to your area?” or “What factors would contribute to making this work?” Virtual meetings can devolve into a conversation between the host and one participant. Try to get all participants to engage with each other, not you.
• If there are some attendees in the room and others on the phone or online, the remote attendees will invariably feel left out. Keep down the private jokes, side conversations, or facial expressions. Be sensitive to their isolation and explain any activity they can hear but can’t see.
• Don’t let the discussion drag on; gauge when you can move to the next topic by asking, “Do you have enough information to move the process forward, or do you need more time?” Enlist the attendees to help keep the meeting on track — it gets them to take ownership of meeting success. Ask, “Are we in the weeds? Can we take that offline (especially if it doesn’t involve the whole team)?”
• Recap at the end of the meeting. Make clear the next steps or due dates, and ensure people know what tasks they are responsible for.

4. After the Meeting

• Send out brief meeting notes and ask for corrections.
• Post the webinar online and send everyone the link.
• Follow up on the items people are responsible for.

Managing meetings isn’t easy and it’s not a science; you learn more every time you do it. One of the best ways is to watch a good facilitator perform. You can analyze what they do well, and copy their moves the next time you run a meeting.

“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” — Thomas Sowell

Now It’s Your Turn

1. If you are a meeting participant, read and follow these Ten Ground Rules for being an Effective Virtual Meeting Participant.
2. Practice your facilitation skills by volunteering to run a small meeting, then asking for feedback.
3. Master your company’s virtual meeting software, such as ReadyTalk, Elluminate or WebEx. Try the online tutorials, then enlist a colleague to act as your audience and use the features so you can perform smoothly.
4. Read these previous posts on Envisioning Successful Outcomes and How Meetings Steal Your Productivity (and 6 Ways to Get it Back).

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

We’d like to share one easy tool for team participation and engagement. Whether you’re in a business, academic, or non-profit environment, you are facing a competitive environment where money and resources are scarce. This analysis tool can help you focus your attention on the specific success factors that are right for your team.

The tool is called a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Here’s what it means:

• Strengths are those positive internal attributes that strengthen your business or team. You can develop plans to capitalize on those strengths.
• Weaknesses are those negative internal attributes that are working against your success. You can shore up those weaknesses so they don’t stop your success.
• Opportunities are those external conditions that can have a positive effect on your goals. These opportunities can point you in the right direction.
• Threats are those external conditions that can have a negative effect on your goals. These threats will affect you less if you can identify and minimize them.

How long will it take? You can do a simple SWOT analysis easily in sixty minutes.

There are many different ways to conduct a SWOT analysis; a large corporation will do this very differently than a small non-profit. We’ve given you some valuable how-to information below in the Now It’s Your Turn section so you can choose your method.

A rigid technique is less important than a well-imagined result. The important outcome of a SWOT is your understanding of the particular strengths you can count on, the pitfalls you might be facing, and the outside forces that might seriously change the landscape going forward.

What Does a SWOT Analysis Look Like?

We thought it would be helpful to show you a sample SWOT analysis for a business you can easily visualize: a small independent bookstore in a university town. The store owner brought the team together to think about how the bookstore could survive during the continuing financial downturn. After an hour of brainstorming, this is the SWOT analysis they developed.

Who Benefits from a SWOT Analysis?

Everyone who participated got something valuable from the exercise. The owner got enough actionable information to guide his planning efforts over the next 2 years. Once he developed the strategic plan, he posted it on the back office wall so that everyone could see it. The team members understood for the first time the challenges the bookstore owner was facing. They felt more engaged in the store’s success, and started suggesting additional opportunities the owner might try to build his business.

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” — Alan Lakein

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Take a look at these websites to learn about SWOT analysis. We’ve provided general information as well as some examples of how it’s used in academia.

• How To Do a SWOT Analysis

• SWOT Analysis Resource Page from Idaho State University

• Strategic Planning Example from SUNY Plattsburgh

2. Try conducting a SWOT analysis. Don’t limit it to the workplace; you can just as easily provide valuable planning support to the board of your non-profit or to your child’s school. In fact, you can use it to plan your own career development!

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

I have one too; it’s my “Master Task List” pinned to the wall. I do pretty well getting my work done, but at the end of a busy week I sometimes realize I haven’t done the work I told myself was important – whether it’s about my professional development, my personal development, or my team’s development. It’s so tempting to check off a bunch of things on my checklist, and too easy to think that it’s progress when it’s really not.

You can boil it down to the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important, and often they are not the same. It’s a concept often discussed in time management; you can find lots of time management books, magazines, blogs, and workshop sessions devoted to the topic. I’ll leave it to you to read a few and pick the time management system that works for you. Instead, I’ll share two pieces of advice I’ve learned: one is aimed at helping individuals and another provides a new way for a whole team to create a shared understanding of what’s really important.

5 Ways You Can Stay Focused on What’s Important

Blogger Jonathan Mead, in his wonderfully titled Pick the Brain blog, gives us five ways to focus on what really matters. I see my strengths and weaknesses in each one of these areas, and I think you will too:

1. Set Three “Most Important Tasks” (MITs) for the day. Ask yourself, “If I could only do three things today, what would I feel the most fulfilled in doing?”

2. Focus on providing value. Ask yourself, “How much value will this provide me, or someone else?”

3. Think long-term. Ask yourself, “Will this make a difference in a week, a month or a year from now? Five years?”

4. Tackle first things first. Finishing the most important tasks in the beginning of the day ensures that you can get to other work and still feel you have accomplished something strategic.

5. Have a clear vision. If you can’t envision it, then you can’t measure it; if you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it. Think about whether or not the work you’re doing is moving you closer to your vision, or if it won’t make much of a difference tomorrow or next week.

A New Way for Your Team to Stay Focused on What’s Important

Lena and I keep coming back to an intriguing idea that was developed in Silicon Valley. In a New York Times  interview, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus talked (among other things) about his success in using a simple system called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). It was developed at Intel and used at Google.

Pincus echoes Jonathan Mead’s idea of the three most important tasks, but he takes it to the next level. The whole company and every single individual has one objective and three measurable key results. It keeps everyone focused on the same understanding of what really matters.

• The process starts with a pared-down “road map” or plan. Pincus says that if your road map has ten priorities for you and your team, you probably don’t know which of the three matter, and probably none of the ten are right.

• At the start of the week, you write down your three priorities for the week, and on Friday you track how you did. Your list shows each item you were going to do, with both their predicted results and actual results. The results are displayed in red if you missed them, yellow if they’re close and green if you met them.

• If you miss your results consistently, you can see that there’s a problem, dig deeper to find it, and course-correct. It’s much better to do that sooner than later. You don’t want to reach the end of the year with a sinking feeling that your team didn’t accomplish what it set out to do.

This method gives you an objective yardstick. You then can ask for help, renegotiate with your manager, or work with the team to make the objectives more closely tied to reality.

How Do You Put OKRs into Action?

Lena and I are planning ways to put OKRs into action. Our team did several wonderful, thoughtful brainstorming sessions and developed a very ambitious two-year plan. It’s on our shared team wiki, and every month we update our progress. We all struggle to fulfill our daily obligations along with the strategic ones, and we never get as far as we wish.

Perhaps the reason is that we have too many objectives, and we move quickly from one to the other trying to move the ball forward each month. It’s time to make some changes in our process. We’re going to share this OKR technique with our team and see if we can get some traction. If it works, and even if it doesn’t, we’ll be sure to share it with you.

“Time is a fixed income and, as with any income, the real problem facing most of us is how to live successfully within our daily allotment.”  — Margaret B. Johnstone

Now It’s Your Turn

For Yourself

• Read Jonathan Mead’s post on five ways to focus on what really matters (linked above).
• Find a time management system that fits your needs.
• Commit to one change and reward yourself when you meet it. (If you try to change your whole life at once, you will get too discouraged.)

For Your Team or Organization

• Read the interview with Mark Pincus on OKRs (linked above).
• Bring the idea to your team and ask if they are willing to try it out. Be sure to explain the benefit to them — always remember that people will be more motivated if they understand the WIIFM (“What’s in it for me?”).

We Want to Hear From You

Please share your ideas! How do you get things done that really matter as an individual, and what works for your organization?

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

Learning isn’t limited to semester-long classes and it doesn’t have to break the bank. Here are some free or inexpensive ways to develop your skills and to get inspired.

7 Ways to Build Your Career on a Budget

1. Volunteer. Volunteer with a favorite organization to learn a new skill or practice an existing skill such as video/media, web design, marketing, business development, community organizing, public speaking, teaching, and more. I recently joined the Board of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble to get more experience in marketing, strategic planning and coordinating volunteers.

2. Check with your human resources department for career development opportunities like training workshops, leadership or management development, or other special programs. Make a suggestion if your company doesn’t offer what you need. Companies often negotiate good deals with training companies, especially for technical training such as computer classes.

3. Try free introductory classes at non-profits and other businesses. For a small investment of time, you can learn something new and decide if paying for more training is right for you. For example, The Foundation Center in San Francisco offers an excellent free introductory grant-writing session and other workshops. Many organizations have free public programs as part of their mission.

4. Check out extension classes at colleges and universities. Be sure to check for free events, guest speakers, seminars, and introductory sessions. Know that courses aimed at lifelong learners get more expensive as you move  from community colleges to state colleges to state universities to private universities. You can decide if it’s worth it to pay more for university extension classes where you’ll get better locations, convenient schedules, and comfortable classrooms with smaller class sizes.

If you’re not sure whether a class is right for you:

• Before enrolling, don’t be afraid to email the instructor and ask questions. (You may need to do a web search on an instructor to find their contact information.)

Here’s an alternative to taking a class if you’re good at learning on your own:

• Check the required reading lists of classes you are interested in (especially expensive classes) and get the books from the public library.

Finally, consider this:

• Taking classes with other professionals is an excellent networking opportunity. In every extension class I’ve attended, at least one person was in the midst of a career shift or job search. The savvy ones made an effort to enlist the help of the other students and teacher to further their efforts.

5. Target your own community. For the insatiably curious: you’re surrounded by learning opportunities in your own community! It’s easy and entertaining to attend a museum lecture or a community event. Check your favorite events websites.

A few of my favorite organizations for interesting speakers and topics in the San Francisco Bay Area are The Commonwealth Club (free podcasts), City Arts & Lectures (free radio broadcasts), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (many free public programs), the Neighborhood Empowerment Network, The Long Now Foundation (free podcasts), and SPUR. Most charge $20 or less for their events. Engage in a discussion on issues important to you, get inspired.

For the artistic, art collectives occasionally have cheap or free lessons or demonstrations (Rock Paper Scissors Collective and The Crucible). Last but not least, don’t forget your public library — a tremendous resource for learning, help with research, free classes and events.

6. Take advantage of the benefits offered by professional organizations. We join them and then we forget about all the events and publications they offer that we are already paying for through our membership fees. Check their websites regularly for what’s new. Many organizations offer free publications and events on their websites.

You may need to occasionally splurge to make a big splash.  It’s true that professional conferences, events, and training are typically pricey, but it may be well worth your investment. This is precisely the time to do your homework (or attend a free event or session) before taking the plunge.  In addition to learning, professional workshops and classes with a single focus — like leadership, management, sales, design, project management — offer you an opportunity to demonstrate your talents. Motivated people who like to learn seek that quality in others.

7. Ask a co-worker. One of the advantages of working with others is the chance to learn from them. Most people are willing to share their experience. Sweeten the deal by offering to share your own talents with them in exchange — you give them tips on facilitating meetings and they help you with a software product. Leslie and I have complementary skills and we share our experience continually. Get advice on how to do this in 5 Tips for Successful Career Collaboration.

“The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.” — B.B. King, quoted outside the Main Library in uptown Charlotte, North Carolina

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Determine what you want to learn.

2. Pick the idea above that best fits your need.

3. Commit to one new learning opportunity in the next 3 months.

4. Share your own favorite ways to learn something new for free in the Comments section below.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

Small talk is not your thing, you say. Is this a skill you really need to develop? Yes. According to CareerBuilder.com: “A study at the Stanford University School of Business tracked a group of MBAs 10 years after they graduated. The result? Grade point averages had no bearing on their success — but their ability to converse with others did.”

The good news is you don’t need to be a virtuoso conversationalist or even an extrovert to strike up a conversation with people you don’t know. So, what do you need to know?

3 Things to Know Before Talking with a Stranger

1. Know your intent. Have a purpose for every social event you attend. Ask yourself: Why I am here? What do I need to accomplish before I leave? For example, at a conference your goal may be to connect with three people and exchange business cards. With a clear goal in mind you have a focus and an incentive to avoid interactions that aren’t moving you towards your goal.  Once you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, you’re free to leave or revisit the buffet.

2. Know yourself. Prepare your “elevator speech” for both personal and professional encounters. An elevator speech imagines you have less than a minute to make an impression and convey something meaningful about yourself to someone. (See our previous post How to Discover Your DNA for ways to understand what makes you unique.)

Who are you and what do you do? Be able to say what you do, what you’re working on, or what your interests are SIMPLY and in a couple of different ways. For example, have both a precise explanation for someone who understands your area and a generalized explanation for everyone else. Avoid using jargon unless you’re at an event where everyone speaks the same jargon. (Even then, you will be a refreshing break from your colleagues if you present yourself using simple clear language.)

As difficult as it may seem, you can boil down your elevator speech into a sentence or two. (You get extra credit if you make your message vivid and memorable.) It doesn’t have to be precise.  For example, I was struggling with describing what I do and another person next to me piped up, “You make libraries easier to use.”  That works, and if someone is really interested, I can go into more detail. This approach invites a dialog and makes you look confident — that is, you appear to have a clear grasp of what you do and care about.

Elevator Speech in Action

Last year Leslie and I attended a townhall meeting introducing incoming University of California President Mark Yudof to staff. Leslie and I prepared ourselves to briefly describe the strategic goals of our group. Sure enough, the opportunity struck when President Yudof introduced himself to us, shook our hands, and asked what we did. Without missing a beat, we were able to tell him our group’s three strategic goals and converse briefly with him about how we were tackling those goals. Our actual goals were less important than the fact that we had concrete goals that were easy to understand and we were actively pursuing them. The key message was we know what we’re doing, why it matters, and we’re actively doing it.

3. Know how to start (and end) a conversation. Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project blog has a terrific post on getting a conversation going that includes bonus tips on how to avoid being boring. Here are her first three tips (see below for a link to her full post):

• Comment on a topic common to both of you at the moment: the food, the room, the occasion, the weather. “How do you know our host?” “What brings you to this event?” But keep it on the positive side! Unless you can be hilariously funny, the first time you come in contact with a person isn’t a good time to complain.

• Comment on a topic of general interest. A friend scans Google News right before he goes anywhere where he needs to make small talk, so he can say, “Did you hear that Justice Souter is stepping down from the bench?” or whatever might be happening.

• Ask open questions that can’t be answered with a single word. “What’s keeping you busy these days?” This is a good question if you’re talking to a person who doesn’t have an office job. It’s also helpful because it allows people to choose their focus (work, volunteer, family, hobby) — preferable to the inevitable question (well, inevitable at least in New York City): “What do you do?”

It can be trickier to remove yourself from a conversation that’s gone sour. Here are some tips:

• Change the subject.
• Stop asking questions or commenting on what the other person has to say.
• End the conversation abruptly, but politely, by asking for a card or setting up your next appointment if you’re discussing business.
• Set up a signal with friends in advance to pull you away.

First Impressions Matter

People will make a judgment about you within a few seconds. Giving the other person your full attention and having a pleasant demeanor will go a long way towards a positive encounter. Here’s an example of how body language matters.  This advice comes from a past Vice President at University of California when she spoke to graduates of the career development program: Always exit an elevator with your head held high and a calm expression. Why? As a leader, it conveys that everything is okay. Conversely, imagine the impression you would get if your director entered your office with their head down and a worried look on their face.

“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.” — Dorothy Nevill

Now, It’s Your Turn

Read one of these brief articles and pick a few tips to try at a work or personal social event.

Seven Tips for Making Good Conversation with a Stranger from Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project blog. Includes tips for knowing if you’re boring someone and tips to avoid being a bore (which are pretty funny!)

12 Tips for Making Small Talk from CareerBuilder.com. Includes tips on exit lines.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

Do you ever wonder what would happen if you refused to deal with all those meetings, emails, and random interruptions? Do you ever dream that if you could just block off a few days to get organized, to really think without interruption, you could do something innovative? And do you also secretly wonder if, after years of running frantically, you even know how to innovate any longer?

My inspiration for this post is a video interview of Jason Fried titled “Why You Can’t Work at Work”. Fried is the co-founder of 37signals, a maker of software tools for project tracking, collaboration and information sharing. (Many of us have used their project tracking software, Basecamp.) Yet with all those great tools to foster communication and innovation, he still gets frustrated with interruptions, especially those created by meetings:

The modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions — and interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time…you don’t work at work any more.

Easy to Say, Hard to Do

Jason Fried’s solutions are striking. While I admire them, I’m not sure how to introduce some of them to our organization and gain acceptance. But they are certainly better than all those tired remedies I read about all the time.

In contrast to Fried’s innovative solutions, those great-in-theory remedies don’t work for our organization:

• No, I can’t check my e-mail only twice a day, because we’re an e-mail culture and you’re expected to respond quickly.
• No, I can’t opt-out of meetings, because we are a culture that highly values consensus.
• And no, if I make myself unavailable by closing the door then I can’t provide one of the vital services of a project manager: serving as the “glue” that pulls together everyone’s news, ideas, and concerns. Besides, talking to people and learning new things — either one-on-one or in a group — is one of the great pleasures of the workplace.

But our team has made some changes about the way we hold meetings; the result is more opportunities for reflection and innovation during the day. These ideas might help you too.

6 Ways Our Team Reduced Meeting Madness

1. Eliminate redundant meetings. We had two weekly one-hour meetings with about 90% overlap in attendees (different projects, same players). We spent most of our time trying to remember who knew what (or getting bored because we’d repeated everything at least twice). We consolidated two meetings into one, saving countless hours and untangling our communications in the process.

2. Share information in a shorter time span. We took the newly consolidated meeting and made it a dual-purpose event. The first segment of the meeting is an operations review for our entire team of fifteen people. We each give a one-minute update on our projects and ask for help or advice as needed; we finish in thirty minutes or less.

That meeting we consolidated in #1 above — it now takes place in the remaining thirty-minute segment. People who aren’t part of those two particular projects are free to leave; the rest of us only need thirty minutes since we shared broadly in the first part of the meeting.

3. Stop taking elaborate meeting notes and sending them to everyone via email (or worse, as a document attachment to e-mail). Instead, use a collaborative space like a wiki or Google Docs to record agreements and commitments. It reduces e-mail traffic; saves space in each person’s email client; and eliminates storage of the document on the organization’s shared drive (a place where documents get stored in mysterious folders never to be found again). It puts information where everyone can easily access it, making it a snap for people who missed the meeting to learn what happened.

4. Hold meetings that really matter. Recognize when an email thread is spinning out of control; people don’t know what steps to take; or there is tension in the team that needs to be resolved face-to-face. That’s the right time to call a meeting. Specify a start and end time. Set an agenda showing desired outcomes. Designate one person as facilitator to help people reach those outcomes. Make sure each task has an owner, a due date, and a clearly defined work-product. (Get more tips in our post Envisioning Successful Outcomes.)

5. Delegate work to small, nimble teams. Last year we held extensive planning sessions to create three-year goals and objectives. Recently we were asked to propose five related goals for this fiscal year. Since we already had a shared understanding, we trusted a small team to draft the additional goals. We posted it on our wiki, collected feedback, and then gained consensus in a quick thirty-minute meeting.

6. Declare one day a week as a meeting-free zone. Even though we never talked about it formally, we don’t hold meetings on Fridays unless it’s absolutely necessary. It gives us a solid block of time to catch-up, think, and plan for the next week.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”  — Annie Dillard

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Listen to Jason Fried’s interview, “Why You Can’t Work at Work”. Share it with your work team and see if you can find better ways to work together. (Lena and I want to get bolder and adapt more of his ideas.)

2. With the time you’ll gain in productivity, try completing a small innovation project that gets you energized. Read our post on How to Embrace Innovation for some motivation.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

You might be pleased to know it can be done, and in only 15 minutes a day. I track about 85 blogs that I admire. I can’t claim I’m really any smarter — but I learn something new every day!

Learning from Blogs in 7 Easy Steps

1. Find a few blogs that you like. They can be about work, culture, hobbies, politics, jokes, or anything you care about. If you don’t know where to look for a good blog, ask your friends what blogs they follow. Once you start reading, you’ll find that bloggers love to feature the work of other bloggers; you can click through to find new blogs pretty quickly. Many blogs display a “blog roll” down the side of the page to display a list of blogs they follow regularly.

2. Subscribe to blog updates by harnessing the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This way, you don’t have to go to each blog — you’ll get new blog posts delivered to your blog reader. Learn more about it by reading What the heck is RSS? And why should I care?

3. Set up a blog reader so that all the RSS feeds are organized. I use Google Reader; it’s web-based so I can get to it from any computer, smart phone or iPad. You can also have the feeds sent to your personalized browser home page or your email account. The important thing is to use something designed for the purpose so it’s quick and tidy. Whichever method you choose, make sure it’s easy and convenient for you to access it every day.

4. Block out 15 minutes each day to skim through the new blog posts. Many bloggers don’t post very often, so it’s not as daunting as it seems. You can quickly decide which ones pique your interest and read them more closely. You’ll find a special few that you can’t wait to read and share with your friends and colleagues.

5. Share your links with others to enrich your social networking. I use Delicious.com to share my finds with friends; StumbleUpon.com is also fun, and there are many others. You can see my list of favorites at: http://delicious.com/leslie_wolf.  Google just introduced a “Share” button on its toolbar.

6. Don’t get overwhelmed. When I come back from vacation and find I have over 1,000 blog entries to look at, I quickly click “Mark All as Read” and move on with my day. Popular themes are repeated often, and a hot topic will be covered and linked by many bloggers.

7. Weed ruthlessly to drop the feeds from blogs you no longer like or that have been abandoned by their owners. Tastes change and people move on; you should too!

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Read the article on RSS shown above.

2. Set up a blog reader or aggregator and create feeds for at least 3 favorite sites.

3. For inspiration, set up an RSS feed for some favorite blogs of Leslie and Lena:
The Heart of Innovation
Innovate on Purpose
Stepcase Lifehack
Stephen’s Lighthouse
TEDTalks (video)
Your Life@Work - don’t forget our blog!

Share Your Favorite Professional Development Blogs

Do you have some favorite blogs about professional development? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

My inspiration comes from the title question, one of twelve questions from the Campaign Boot Camp public service fitness test. “Do you want to be something or do something?” means to look beyond yourself and apply your strengths to something you care deeply about — to take action.

7 Ways to Get Motivated

1. Spend 15 minutes a day focusing on something you care about. Make a pact with yourself that you will take this time EVERY day. Do you have an idea for something you’ve always wanted to do but just never find the time to get started? A business idea, a public service idea, something involving friends or family? Take fifteen minutes and write down as much of your idea as you can.  Keep adding to it every day. Eventually, you’ll see your idea turn into a solid plan of action. Slowly is better than not at all. Focus on one thing at a time.

2. Volunteer. Share your time and expertise with a cause you care about. Or better yet, start your own cause. One Brick is a good way to jump-start your volunteering — they offer no-commitment one-time volunteering opportunities with a social twist in many communities including the San Francisco Bay Area. Do you want to learn a new skill or practice an existing skill? Either way, being a volunteer is a good way to do it. Contact your favorite organizations and propose how you can help them.

3. Take a class. Full disclosure — this is my default response to everything. For me, the biggest benefit of a class is that it’s prescribed time devoted to doing the thing you’re learning about. I also like the interaction of hearing others’ ideas and being able to ask questions.  You make a commitment to do the work when you take a class; while reading a book or just figuring it out on your own gives you too much room to procrastinate. Of course, classes are still only a means to an end. You’ve got to take what you learn and apply it.

4. Try something new. What’s the one thing you want to do but you never quite manage to find the time or courage to do? If you’re hesitant, get a friend to join you — or simply to encourage you. If it’s finding time, mark a date in your calendar today. Woody Allen says, “80% of success is showing up.”

5.  Hijack your routine. Instead of watching TV tonight, take one hour and do something different — take a walk, go to an event, visit a museum, talk to a friend, have a game night, work on your business plan, or start a blog. A co-worker explained the religious observance of Lent to me this way twenty years ago and it has always stuck with me: It’s not about giving something up. It’s about getting out of your routine to see your life in a new way.

6. Choose a monthly focus. You have twelve opportunities to focus on something you care about. For example, my goal is to rekindle my love of music, so that will be my focus in August. I’m going to listen to my favorite music every day on my way to work and while I’m cooking, and I’ll discover new music at the library.  I will go to at least one concert and I will learn more about a favorite composer by reading a book or watching a movie. In How to Be Happy at Work, Leslie reminded us that “it takes 21 days to make a (good or bad) habit, so be persistent.”

7. Take a trip. It’s amazing how clear things become when you get yourself out of your daily routine. Vacations are one of those rare times when we truly get away. If we’re lucky, we’re completely immersed in the present moment and we come back refreshed and renewed. Be sure to capture all your new perspectives and ideas for when you return.

“I always knew I wanted to become somebody when I grew up. Now I realize I should have been more specific.”– Lily Tomlin

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Check out Christine Pelosi’s book Campaign Boot Camp: Basic Training for Future Leaders. Even if you’re not interested in public service, she offers practical advice on leadership, team-building, negotiation and communication. Or, take her class Public Service Leadership Boot Camp at UC Berkeley Extension in the fall and spring semesters.

2. Do something meaningful one evening a week (or even one evening a month) to get yourself started.

3. Read these articles:

You Are What You Do All Day from Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog

Realizing Your Potential from Innovations blog (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Which of these ideas would you try? Do you have a motivating idea to share?