Meetings can be a complete waste of time (and drain the life from your employees). But even when meetings are useful and necessary, spending hours in the same conference room week after week can make you and your staff a little stir-crazy. Consider these alternatives to shake things up: Chat with employees. You can discover a lot by simply talking with your team members in … [Read more...]
Protecting Your Time When You Are a Busy Manager
Being a manager is time consuming. If you accept that fact, you won’t resent the extra hours you spend at the office. Chances are you’ve found yourself stuck at work in the evening completing a project that you could have finished easily within normal work hours in the days before you became a boss. Even though you have more on your plate as a manager, you can slice some of … [Read more...]
10 Ways to Increase Your Productivity This Week
Build better time-management habits and you will be amazed by the way your productivity soars, as your stress level sinks. Add these practices to your workday: Save less. Be honest: How many files do you have that you never refer to? The surest way to avoid clutter is to never allow it to collect. Make your first instinct to delete an email or recycle a paper instead of … [Read more...]
Having Better Meetings
I'm often asked about how to have better meetings and more often than not, the other person wants me to boil the advice down to the #1 thing for improving their meetings. Now that's a tall order but I'm going to try to tackle this challenge today and give you my #1 best way to have better meetings. https://youtu.be/FhfcEWGbPlk?rel=0&showinfo=0 Tweet it out: To … [Read more...]
Take the Pain Out of Annual Evaluations
Most organizations still require managers to conduct annual evaluations. We recommend offering more frequent, timely feedback to improve and maintain performance. Still, if the annual review is one of your jobs requirements, you can't avoid it. As a new leader, it can be pretty overwhelming, especially if you have to conduct several reviews all at once. That's why we … [Read more...]
Stop Working Hard and Work Smart Instead
If extra-long workdays have been the norm since you became a boss, it’s time to find out why, before you burn out. Because at some point you won't have anything left to work harder. You'll have used up all your mental power, energy and enthusiasm. However, you can always work smarter. Follow these steps to do so. Take a close look at what you’re doing during those long … [Read more...]
Stop Spending So Much Time on Email
It's Friday, and you may be starting to wrap up your week and may even be planning to make it a long weekend heading into the 4th of July. Whether you make it back into the office on Monday or Wednesday or some day thereafter, vow to spend less time on email. You already know why. Constant email interruptions steal precious time from other tasks because it takes you … [Read more...]
10 Ways Meetings Drain the Life from Your Team
We've all attended meetings that were a big waste of time. There are many ways meetings can go wrong, but as a manager, you can prevent many of those problems. Check your meeting behaviors against the following list, and make changes if you’re guilty of any of these sins: Meeting for the sake of meeting. Don’t fall into the rut of scheduling a marketing meeting for Tuesday … [Read more...]
5 Really Good Reasons for You to Relax This Long Weekend
The long Memorial Day weekend is upon us, so it's a great time to remind you why you should make time to relax and have fun. You have a lot on your plate. You have lots to think about, lots to do and lots to decide. Still, you will be so much more successful if you unplug and take a breather every once in a while (starting this weekend). However, before the sheer thought of … [Read more...]
Write an Agenda That Does What it’s Supposed to Do
We’ve all walked out of a meeting and thought “Wow, that was a waste of time.” Perhaps the meeting had no clear purpose, the participants strayed off topic or the issues weren’t adequately resolved. It's incredibly frustrating because it eats up time most of us don't have. What's even more frustrating is that those time-wasting experiences can usually be avoided if the guys … [Read more...]