The CDL is seeking a developer for the Unified Digital Format Registry (UDFR, http://www.udfr.org).

The UDFR project is developing a reliable, sustainable, and publicly available semantic knowledge base of file format representation information.

Stakeholders for this project are drawn from academic and national libraries and archives around the world, including the University of California, Harvard University, the Florida Center for Library Automation, the Library of Congress, Library and Archives Canada, the British Library, the UK and US National Archives, the Koniklijke Bibliotheek and Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands, and many others. The project is funded by the Library of Congress as part of its National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program.

 If you or someone you know is interested in applying, please apply through this link:

 https://jobs.ucop.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=53751

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.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

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.

Since then, I’ve been thinking more about patterns in the kind of work we do, and I think there are several different ways that patterns enable inventiveness.

Patterns can act like building blocks upon which, or from which, we create something entirely new. An example of this is modular or component development, such as the Merritt Micro Services launched recently by CDL’s UC3 team. These are discrete services that can stand alone or plug in together to create exactly the curation system needed for a local solution. The UC3 components are open and can also interface with components created by other developers, and so, in this very real way, they are a basis for innovation.

Image courtesy of the Allis-Chalmers (Oxnard Plant) Archives, Oxnard Public Library Photograph Collection

In a slightly altered manner, patterned processes can also enable innovation. That is, by codifying some procedures and techniques, it’s possible to analyze work flows, which can then lead (sometimes) to innovations in the way work gets done. It can also (sometimes) free up resources. This kind of work has to be undertaken by those who truly understand the domain, or the results can be counter productive.

An example of this kind of process analysis is work that the Next Generation Technical Services Task Force groups have been considering. Their collective charge has been, in effect, to look for places in the UC Libraries’ technical services where common and repeatable processes can be done once and not 10 times, so that scarce resources can be allocated to the special and innovative work that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

In this case, there is a double dose of creativity. The solutions being proposed are, in many cases, innovative. And, if they are adopted, and succeed, then they will release resources for other creative work.

In project management, we use patterns too. When assessing risk, we are looking out at the road ahead and identifying patterns we’ve seen before, hoping to avoid the potholes. When we use proven techniques and templates, we hope to capitalize on knowledge we’ve gained through experience, freeing ourselves to focus on unusual situations that may arise.

The trick in using patterns, and this is as true in the world of design as it is in the world of project management, is to know when to apply the rule and when to depart from it. You have to know when to adapt, to look around and see that the place you’re in is a specific place that demands creativity from you and offers you the promise of new discoveries.

In this third installment in our series on the power of visuals, we’ll dive deeper into using visuals specifically for strategic planning. The real challenge is not creating the infographic chart; it’s making sure your strategic plan has all the right elements to keep you focused.  First, let’s consider why a visual representation of your strategic plan is worth the effort.

Why Is A Visual Strategic Plan Good?

• Clarity. Creating a visual map of your strategic plan offers another way to ensure your plan makes sense. I was surprised by how many questions I had about Leslie’s and my blog marketing plan when I was translating it into a visual.  It’s better to clarify your plan sooner rather than later.
• Quick reference. Your chart is basically a cheat-sheet to your plan; it’s everything you need to know in one easy-to-print 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of standard letter-size paper.  Making it easy to print makes it more useful — you can pin it on your bulletin board or keep it in a project folder for quick reference.
• Easy to show relationships. A written strategic plan with hierarchical numbering can be daunting to read with its jumble of numbers, letters, and roman numerals. It’s often more difficult to show the various connections among the goals, objectives, strategies and tactics.

Leslie and I were impressed with Ben McConnell’s one-page strategic plan infographic on the Church of the Customer Blog. It inspired us to create a strategic plan infographic for Your Life@Work so we could try out this visualization technique (see below).  For simplicity’s sake, our chart has only one objective and one strategy for each goal.

Here’s how to build your own chart:

• First row: Goals. List your top goals for the period — no more than five goals and three is better — across the top of the page (e.g., “Attract more readers”).
• Second row: Objectives. Position your objectives under the first row to match them with the appropriate goal (“1% of readers comment”).
• Third row: Strategies. Detail the strategies you’ll use  to reach those objectives (“Encourage readers to comment”).
• Fourth row: Tactics. List your tactics to implement those strategies (“Publish our email address on our posts”).
• Draw arrows to connect everything (e.g., match objectives to their goal and strategies with their objectives).

Finally, don’t let your lack of Adobe Illustrator or other specialized design software stop you.  Many commonly-available software packages have easy-to-use drawing tools including Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.  Moreover, a simple hand-drawn chart is just as effective — and it might even be more compelling.

Goals vs. Objectives and Strategies vs. Tactics – What’s The Difference?

You may have noticed that our marketing plan chart (above) has goals at the top while the Church of the Customer example has objectives at the top. Your plan will not implode if you call a goal an objective or vice versa. The important point is to have a desired outcome that you are seeking and to outline the progressive steps that will get you there.  Before you get started, reach an agreement with your team about which terms you will use and how you will define them — it’s vital to your plan.

Do I Really Need All Four?

Our impulse is often to set a goal and jump right to tactics (the detailed “how” part of executing the plan). So? We miss the chance to consider several possible strategies; more importantly, we neglect to state a measurable objective (asking “what does success look like” to develop a desired outcome.) For more on defining desired outcomes, see our post on Envisioning Successful Outcomes. Bottom line: You will have a stronger plan if you cover all four bases — goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics.

“Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” — Tom Landry

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Find out more about Ben McConnell’s Church of the Customer one-page strategic plan infographic (link above) and read his previous post on defining goal, objective, strategy, and tactic and why it’s important to agree what they mean.

2. If you have a strategic plan, turn it into a visual infographic (see instructions above) and share it with your team.

3. Read this brief article on strategy vs. tactics from BrandInsightBlog.

4. For more tips on using visuals, see our previous posts: Use the Power of Visuals to Get Your Point Across and Going Beyond Pie Charts: More Ways to Use Visuals.

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.

Why should we continue to provide service X in the library (or research center) when it could be provided–or may be provided already–in open the marketplace?

This is a good question, actually. Resources are scarce, and public resources are especially scarce. All of us want to be sure that they are being spent in the best possible way.

The answer I gave was this: a service offering from librarians should show evidence of listening to users. That is, I would expect that it would be meeting the needs of a particular community or group of communities, perhaps even one that is under-served by the open market.

I hold this view because librarians have special training in how to listen effectively. It’s called the reference interview. It’s surprising how much the spirit of that interaction informs the way many of us think about what we do, even if we have never staffed a reference desk or put in a shift on a virtual reference service.

While thinking about this, I read a blog post on the practice of Active Listening which argued that listening is an essential project management skill. It struck me that these two methodologies have some important ideas in common, and so I humbly present what is possibly the world’s first…

Reference Interview: Active Listening CrossWalk

One conclusion you might draw from this fanciful exercise is that the reference interview model has the advantage of built-in assessment, not only with checking back to confirm understanding, but also after the conclusion of delivering the requested information or service.

The other feature of the reference interview model that really jumps out when you look at this chart is that librarians are basically hard-wired to deliver solutions. Both the interview and active listening are processes that iterate, so, in the case of the reference interview, the librarian’s goal is to maintain the connection until the information need is fulfilled.

When you think about it, this is a powerful model for service delivery!

So why does it fail much of the time? And what can we do to make it work? To get some new perspective, I turned to the web for answers – and I’m happy to share what I learned, because it gave me a path forward as a project manager and member of a group. Much of it hinges on whether you are currently a work group or a team, and if you should become something else.

What’s the Definition of a Team?

This definition of a team comes from a heavily-quoted book on team-building, The Wisdom of Teams (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993): “A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, a set of performance goals, and a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

What does that really mean? Consultant Sharon Feltham breaks it down this way:

6 Success Factors that Define a Team

1. Small number of people: There are fewer than 12 members (sometimes much fewer)
2. Complementary skills: The team identifies and uses the different perspectives, knowledge, skills and strengths of each member.
3. Performance goals: The team has clearly defined objectives for which members are individually and collectively accountable.
4. Common approach: There is a sense of shared purpose, with a clear understanding of the team’s mission and vision.
5. Mutually accountable: The results come from a collective effort rather than just the sum of individual efforts. People are accountable not only for their own efforts but those of others.
6. Leadership: Instead of having a strong solo leader, the team rotates leadership.

What’s the Definition of a Work Group?

Consultant Marie J. Kane [PDF article] notes that in a work group, there is “no significant incremental performance need or opportunity that would require it to become a team.” So the members may come together to share ideas or help each other make decisions in their own areas of responsibility, but mutual accountability is lacking — there is no common objective.

Deborah Mackin, an author of several team-building books, points to a fundamental difference: “a small group of people with complementary skills and abilities who are committed to a leader’s goal and approach and are willing to be held accountable to the leader.” In other words, the group accepts the goals they are given, the members report to the leader, and individual performance is generally evaluated by that leader.

Should a Group Always Try to Become a Team?

Look around your organization. There are probably few genuine teams, and you can spot them immediately because their work is stellar. Everyone talks about them and admires their efforts. These teams perform well for two key reasons: the six success factors noted above are all present; and the members have put a tremendous amount of time, effort, and emotional capital into forming a high-performance team.

4 Questions to Determine if You Need a Team

1. Is there a genuine need for change?
2. Will there be a return on investment?
3. Is there support from senior management?
4. Is there enough potential for better performance from the individuals in the group?

What’s The Path Forward?

I said at the beginning of this post that I saw the way forward, so here it is: my group is genuinely a work group and should remain so. We are large. We don’t all do the same work — in fact some of us have never worked together on a project or service. But that’s not to say we’ve given up on the idea of teams.

Instead, we’ve started focusing on building small high-performance teams within our group –- even two people can constitute a high performance team. Being on a high performance team makes me feel like I’m really making a difference, and it gives me a chance to stretch my wings and improve my skills. In time we hope to see more small teams working together to create change.

And of course Lena and I hope our readers see us as a team — we have worked hard to fulfill all the criteria of a genuine team and it’s made our work together very satisfying.

What’s happening in your area? Should you be a team or a group? Maybe it’s time to make a conscious choice!

Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.
– Henry Ford

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Learn more about the differences between teams and work groups by reading the articles linked above.

2. Talk to your work group about whether change is needed and whether they can make a commitment to changing the way they work.

3. Before you move forward, be sure to read The Wisdom of Teams (Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, 1993). It’s a wealth of information, advice, and practical steps that will help your team to achieve its goals.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

Let’s look at some examples of data visualization — also called information visualization and information graphics or infographics. (They are closely related and for our purposes it’s not worth distinguishing the differences.) What’s important to us is how these examples use visual means to convey information clearly and in memorable, creative, and often humorous ways.

9 Places to Find Amazing Data Visualization Examples

1. The World of 100

The World of 100 project by Toby Ng Design uses simple graphics to explain demographic relationships in global society.  For example, in Skin Colour a zebra’s stripes show the proportion of white and non-white people in the world. In Nationality a world map shows continents drawn to scale with their population, which makes it easy to see at a glance where most of the world’s population lives.

Takeaway: You can do this! The “100 method” is powerful and it’s easy enough for any of us to use. Take a look at the World of 100 project visualizations (and the Twitter example cited below in #4) and you’ll see how to apply it to your own visualizations. It’s an effective and simple way to make a compelling point; it reduces complexity and focuses on things people can easily relate to and that capture their imagination. We can all picture one hundred people.

2. Not Just Another Pretty Picture

Especially for libraries: “An exploration of visualization techniques that can help libraries make a compelling case to stakeholders and get insight about how data visualization can help libraries make more informed decisions.”  This is a blog post by Hilary Davis in the In the Library with the Lead Pipe blog (November 2009). It’s a fantastic resource with an overview of data visualization, visualization tools, and recommended visualization blogs.

3. FlowingData

FlowingData is the visualization and statistics blog of Nathan Yau, a UCLA PhD candidate in statistics with a focus in data visualization. In his own words: “I highlight how designers, programmers, and statisticians are putting data to good use.” He is prolific in posting outstanding data visualization examples from other sources annotated with his personal insights, and he posts his own projects and experiments with data visualization.  The topics span the gamut from 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs to History of the Beatles as told by their hair, in more than twenty categories like Infographics, Statistical Visualization, and Data Design Tips. Tip: Categories are not listed on the home page.  Click on a category link in the byline of any post to get to a page with the full list of categories.

4. Information Is Beautiful

The blog’s tagline is “Ideas, issues, knowledge, data – visualized!” Stunning examples by London-based data journalist and data designer David McCandless include The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions, If Twitter Was 100 People, and his recent visualization based on Clay Shirky’s writings on Cognitive Surplus. In his words: “My pet-hate is pie charts. Love pie. Hate pie-charts.”

5. xBlog: The Visual Thinking Weblog (category: data visualization)

XPLANE’s xBlog is “widely respected as a definitive resource for designers, visual storytellers and information architects. You’ll find links to sites discussing visual thinking, web design, art, creativity, information architecture and design, graphic design, symbols, typography, photography, information graphics, illustration, interface design, usability, language and more.” I found the actual design of the blog a little difficult to navigate; I wasn’t sure where to click, but the content makes it worthwhile.

XPLANE‘s mission is to create understanding. They clarify complex business issues through visual collaboration. Their tagline is “The Visual Thinking Company.” In their own words: “We visualize clarity.” XPLANE was founded by Dave Gray in 1993 and is now the leading design firm focused on information-driven communications.

6. VizThink

VizThink is a community focusing on infographics, sketching, and presentations. You can join their email list and find out about conferences, classes, and other news. In their own words: “VizThink is a global community for visual thinkers and communicators who like to get beyond words and believe that visuals can be an effective tool whether you’re just trying to work through your ideas or working to get your message across as simply as possible.”

7.  Smashing Magazine’s Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

Vitaly Friedman, who wrote this post in 2007, is editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine and a successful designer.  Some of the topics covered are mindmaps, displaying news, displaying data, displaying connections.  Caveat: Since this is a static blog post and not a blog continuously posting new examples, these examples may be slightly dated. Tip: Smashing Magazine, which began in 2006, is a great resource for web design tips for designers and developers.

8. Cool Infographics

The Cool Infographics blog by Randy Krum “highlights examples of data visualizations and infographics found in magazines, newspapers and on the Internet” and includes a useful list of Cool Links of other data visualization and infographics blogs. In his own words, he’s “always looking for better ways to get the point across.” His logo, a smiley face with sunglasses (similar to the Yahoo “what’s cool” icon from the 1990′s) started making me crazy after a few minutes, but he admits he’s not a designer, so I can’t hold that against him.

9. Flowcharts are a good place to start. Last but not least, I couldn’t resist including a couple of humorous flowcharts. Flowcharts are a simple way to communicate visually and most of us have created at least one. A key principle in designing flowcharts is “reduction” — eliminating as much extraneous information and design elements as you can. And have some fun!

Do you need a new logo? (flowchart) — One of the decision points in the center of the graphic is “Does your logo use clip art?” and one of the possible answers is, “Wait, clip art is a bad thing?”

Bacon Flowchart — Needs no introduction.

“As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs.” — Lisa Simpson. The Simpsons. Episode 257. January 7, 2001. Source: FlowingData.

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Check out one of the examples above and try your hand at inventing your own ways to visualize data.

• Start with the “100 method” or do a simple flowchart.
• Many visualization images can be reused for non-commercial purposes. Find some favorites to use in your presentations.

2. Carry a camera everywhere and take photos of things that inspire you. It’s an easy way to capture ideas, to train yourself to really look at things, and to think visually. Since cameras are built into most mobile phones, it’s convenient. For example, I take photos of houses in San Francisco that are adjacent to each other and identical in architecture but have been decorated differently over the years.  I tag this photo series as “twins.”  It’s a treasure hunt for me and it trains me to spot subtle differences — like those “what’s different in these two pictures” books that we enjoyed as kids.

Image credit: Are you happy? flowchart by Alex Koplin and David Meiklejohn at h34dup.com

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.