Try not to waste group time
Today I wasted 1,000 minutes of other people’s time! That is 16.66 hours of collective time. Two full working days! I feel bad about this, even though it was out of my control. I was running a training webinar for a large group of 50 people. We were using Zoom, which is a platform that […]
Read MoreHow The Oscars can teach us how to communicate
‘And the award for best picture goes to…La La Land’. Oops! Many of you will remember the terrible gaffe at the 2017 Academy Awards where Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner for the Best Picture award. It should have been Moonlight, and of course, it was Moonlight when the error was corrected. […]
Read MoreDon’t make it more complex than it is!
I learned a good lesson this week. Or rather, I relearned a good lesson, because this is stuff that I teach people. Sometimes, I just forget my own strategies. A client gently reminded me of a piece of work that I had promised him, but I had procrastinated on. Luckily, he had scheduled a “Due […]
Read MoreCreating equality in your hybrid meetings
We can all see how the way we work has changed in so many ways over the last year, and I believe we will never go back to the same way of working again. What the future of work looks like is still unclear, but one of the things I envisage being part of our […]
Read MoreThe stories we tell ourselves
I reckon we all tell a few white lies from time to time. I personally hold honesty as a key value, but I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to the little lies that just make things easier. And sometimes we tell ourselves and our colleague’s stories that bend the truth […]
Read MoreA year that stretched me for the better
As we start to draw the curtains on what has been one of the most challenging years in memory, I would like to say a big thank you and share some learnings. I am a glass half-full type of guy, so I’ve been reflecting on what I have learned over the past eight months. COVID-19 […]
Read MoreIt is not all about you
I recently had a conversation with a senior client about her struggle to get her team to approach their weekly 1:1 meetings in a consistent way. She had started to use MS OneNote to share discussion lists with a couple of her team and was so pleased with the result she wanted to extend this […]
Read MoreWhen communicating urgency does not help
One of my colleagues in the training industry is Chris Meredith. Chris helps people to create, capture and communicate great ideas. When I was writing Urgent!, he shared a story with me about communicating urgency that I thought was worth sharing with you. I was once teaching a friend to skipper a yacht. We were […]
Read MoreMake your deadlines highly visible
One of the key strategies we teach in our Smart Work program is the idea of managing the Start Date of a task, not the Due Date. The premise here is that if your task list is sorted by Due Dates, there is a greater risk that you may fall into the trap of leaving things until […]
Read MoreWorking under pressure
I read a great blog (The lie of working better under pressure) recently that got me thinking about working under pressure, especially under the pressure of a deadline. The blog was aimed at students, but I think it holds a lesson for all of us, as many of our unproductive habits around deadlines come from […]
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