Category Archives:
Our work spaces are changing
A couple of weeks ago I talked about the need to stay productive while working remotely. Now that many of us are working from home, the work spaces we were used to have changed. The open plan office space, physical meeting rooms, huddle boards and even the communal kitchen area are out of bounds to […]
Read MoreHow not to interrupt Bob Geldof
The moment I met Bob Geldof was not as cool as it should have been, and it was my own fault. It was 1993, and I was backpacking my way around Australia. I ended up in Mildura picking grapes, and to my surprise, heard that Bob Geldof was coming to town. He’d been through a […]
Read MoreMake meeting roles explicit
I was asked to attend a meeting with a new client recently to discuss the relevance of our productivity training for their team. The meeting invite was sent out by the client to me and a handful of internal people. As the meeting invitees came into the meeting room, I was introduced to each by […]
Read MoreThe 25 Minute Meeting
My good friend and colleague Donna McGeorge has just published a new book that I can’t wait to share with you. It is called The 25 Minute Meeting and shows you how to double the impact of your meetings in half the time. If you’ve have been following my recent blogs, especially since I released Smart Teams, […]
Read MoreThink about where you store information
We have so much information to manage these days, and it can be hard to work out where to put it all. Most of us default to keeping our emails in folders in our mailbox, and documents in folders on our computer. This is fine in most circumstances. However, it can be frustrating for your […]
Read MoreThe five-finger meeting evaluation
There is an old joke about meetings that I quite like. Not all meetings are bad – some of them are cancelled. Harsh, but funny. I write a lot about meetings in my new book, Smart Teams, and believe we can all get better with how we organise, run and attend meetings. But meetings are […]
Read MoreMake meetings count
One of the most common ways that we cause productivity friction in our team is through unnecessary and unproductive meetings. Not every meeting is unnecessary or unproductive, but many are, and most could be tightened up at least a bit. I hear stories about meetings from clients that would make your blood boil and your […]
Read MoreTry making less noise
My upcoming book, Smart Teams is essentially about how we work together more productively, and how we reduce the friction we cause each other when we interact. One of the main ways we cause productivity friction is when we communicate using tools like email. We may not mean to, but we create way too much […]
Read MoreGoing beyond productive
If you’ve read my first book, Smart Work, I hope you are better for it, working in a way that is personally productive. But even in teams where everyone has had personal productivity training and has committed to working as productively as possible, there can still be a productivity drain. This is because personal productivity […]
Read MoreTrack your project progress
At the start of 2017 I set myself a goal of taking a six-kilometre run every week for the whole year. I have not been 100% successful, but most weeks you’ll see me down by the river with my running gear on. With a few runs under my belt, I started to focus on my […]
Read More