Linked – Focus Makes Us Human; Don’t Give It Away

Linked – Focus Makes Us Human; Don’t Give It Away

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

That’s no way to be effective, though, and it’s well beyond the time our work and personal cultures started recognizing that, and it’s beyond time we made changes to stop giving away our focus like that instead of keeping it where it matters. That can look like blocking time out on our work calendars for focused work, ignoring emails and other distractions during meetings, or ignoring our devices when trying to be fully present with our friends and families. Multi-tasking doesn’t work. If you’re being distracted, you are not keeping your focus on what is essential. You’re letting everything else steal your focus. That’s not a good way to be successful in any area of your life.

Linked – The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture

Linked – The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is where having a lot of meetings becomes a problem. When you need to do focused work, you wind up doing it after hours. That’s not sustainable. The other thing that this constant multitasking does is it feeds on itself. Picture this, if you will.

You schedule a meeting to discuss the project status. Half of the people at that meeting are squeezing it in between other meetings and thus are multi-tasking during the status meeting. You can watch them on camera answering emails while the discussion is going on, or they are wily enough to do it off-camera but aren’t engaged.

After the meeting, someone sends an email summarizing the conversation, which is responded to by one of the people who were multi-tasking with questions they didn’t ask during the meeting. This prompts another meeting to go over those questions.

Might it work better if the project status was done in writing, asynchronously, and the meeting never needed to happen?

You Really Are Interviewing the Company Too

You Really Are Interviewing the Company Too

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve watched more than one interviewer struggle to answer this question, I’ve heard stories of just some really poor answers, and I’ve had interviewers answer this in very clear detail. The ones who were prepared to answer that question were the ones who had already considered the metrics that would be involved in measuring employees and who, frankly, made a better fit. Knowing how you’re being measured allows you to start on the first day knowing what’s expected of you and what is important. How could you not want that? How could you hire someone and not know what success looks like for that hire? It’s not a good sign for you as a hiring manager or for the culture of your organization.

Linked – The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

Linked – The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I’ve heard many people say, the problem is not that having managers is bad; it’s that there are so many bad managers out there. We don’t treat managing and leadership with the attention and importance it deserves, mainly because we don’t realize how much it matters. Good management is boring. (A point made in more detail in the link below) I say that because good management has no drama and no chaos. It’s pretty simple communication about expectations and follow-through. Unfortunately, those managers don’t get highlighted in magazine features because they aren’t interesting. But that’s the point. Good management isn’t there to be entertaining in a reality-TV kind of way; it is there so that the team can get the job done.

Another New Term for People Looking out for Themselves – Career Cushioning

Another New Term for People Looking out for Themselves – Career Cushioning

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

The quickest way to cut expenses is to cut staff. This is the way of the world in the 21st Century. Until someone comes along and changes that, it only makes sense to keep your options open. As the article I linked points out, that can mean keeping your knowledge and skills up to date, staying in touch with your network, and possibly looking at side gigs you could hop to if you find yourself in a company that is laying off staff.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s not disloyal to your employer. That’s not the world we work in any longer.

A Cursor is a Small Thing you can Change to Make Online Training Better

A Cursor is a Small Thing you can Change to Make Online Training Better

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

Jim Calloway shared a tip about changing your cursor color and size on his Law Practice Tips blog, and it reminded me of a little bit of a pet peeve that I often have with people doing technology demos or training remotely. They move too fast.

Rather, they move as if we all saw the screen exactly as they do. When you’re doing remote learning like that, you have to account for two things when it comes to your cursor. One is video lag. The other is how small it may appear in the shared-screen environment.