Shared Links (weekly) Jan. 22 2023

Shared Links (weekly) Jan. 22 2023

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

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

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

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?

Shared Links (weekly) Dec. 11 2022

Shared Links (weekly) Dec. 11 2022

Quick Thought – The Scourge of Back-to-Back Meetings
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Quick Thought – The Scourge of Back-to-Back Meetings

Don’t get me wrong. I would have still spent some time reviewing the document before the meeting, making notes, and mapping out plans after the other meeting. But because these were not in the middle of back-to-back meetings, I could do them and keep the flow through the process. I wasn’t filing it away in my brain and hoping I could fully recall it later. It was fresh.

It was better.

Linked: Remote Workers Waste 67 Minutes Of Their Day Being Digitally Present
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Linked: Remote Workers Waste 67 Minutes Of Their Day Being Digitally Present

It’s true. There are times when we need to meet virtually. With each other, or with a customer. A lot of our work, however, simply doesn’t require us to be in a meeting to get it done, and yes, that includes reporting on the status of projects. There’s no reason much of our work can’t be done asynchronously, and if people felt free to work that way, they would get more work done instead of showing up to meetings just to be marked present.