This dog’s ready to rumble! Now read the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:
Breaking the Bad Meeting Habit
How ShopLocket uses iDoneThis to Maximize Progress
What a messy desks says about you
The Grumpy Employee’s Guide to Being Happier at Work
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Why do we continue to have bad meetings? Seriously, 99% of the human population seem to hate them, and there are surveys showing again and again that there are x many meetings everyday that cost gabillions of dollars worth of wasted time and productivity.
Is it some horrible concoction of misplaced optimism that this time it’ll be better, resigned acceptance that this is a required dog and pony show — the business world’s tradition of dance, monkey, dance — and a massive buildup of bad meeting history that’s created such intense inertia that only superheroes can help us pull away into the light?
Imagine that a group of you had to build a doghouse like Snoopy’s, and you got a toolbox, some wood, and pencils and paper. Your team is revved up about this cool doghouse, you can envision it, you have all these super useful tools, but all your team does with the pencils and paper is doodle pictures of cute dogs instead of making a blueprint or marking down measurements. Then when you run out of paper, you ask for more paper — only to doodle more pictures of dogs.
That’s how we’re treating meetings. Meetings are a helpful tool to decide and plan things. But misused, they’re just a bunch of meaningless doodles that don’t lead to anything being built and Snoopy with no place to live.
Weekend edition of link love! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
LinkedIn CEO’s Unconventional Meeting Technique
Brainwriting: the solution to brainstorming’s loudmouth problem.
12 Things Successful People do Differently
3 Differences Between Managers & Leaders
Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Sign up for our very new newsletter for thoughtful posts on how to work better, useful tips, & exclusive content here.
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
Innovation doesn’t require a fancy degree & high scores.
How to defend against power-play meetings.
What you do doesn’t define you.
The slightly crazy ways Buffer builds an awesome company culture.
Take back control of your attention with conscious computing!
Supercharge your content marketing.
Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Need to personalize your timezone settings? Head over to email settings.
Almost all meetings are just power-plays in disguise.
Years of my life have been wasted in useless meetings. At a large company, meetings are standard. Get a few people together to talk about a problem. Sounds easy, right?
But instead of a quick resolution, you have to book a conference room for two days from now. Then, you invite stakeholders. Someone suggests so-and-so should attend too. More invites.
When you finally meet, what happens? Nothing, because everyone ends up in a power-play.
Let’s take a look at three common useless meetings and ways we can fix them.
Knowledge is power, and when you’re an entrepreneur and running a small business, it’s a challenge to get sufficient people-power to catch all the relevant information and news out there. We talked with Michelle Frome, president of C2I Intel, which solves that problem by delivering that knowledge directly, providing competitor and industry intelligence to help companies gain a leg up.
Michelle’s path to providing the business scoop was indirect. Brought on by a company to help build an electronic medical record product, she found that she needed a way to keep track of confusing and evolving regulations, as well as keep up with competitors. She worked with programmers in Vietnam to create the technology that would automate much of that work. With the medical records project up in the air, Michelle and her team decided to focus on developing the software for business intelligence instead, bringing in review teams to help target, tailor, and finetune the research.
The Mozilla Foundation has a super software team working on projects that range from Popcorn (a video remixing application) to Thimble (an easy-to-use web page maker) to Open Badges (a digital badges system that support learning and achievement).
Developer Jon Buckley talked with us about the struggle to align three teams when Mozilla wanted to integrate Badges into both Popcorn and Thimble. Combining multiple product worlds could very well collide into chaos and confusing communication, but Mozilla is seeing smooth sailing.
Status update discussion used to fall to a weekly call, which was time-consuming, while a shared mailing list was only used periodically for such purposes. The Mozilla teams soon turned to iDoneThis to coordinate communication for people spread across time zones and for cutting across teams. “You don’t have to worry about being in the same room at the same time. That asynchronous nature of updating people is very helpful.”