What do you want to achieve?

Define a clear purpose. Meetings with a clear purpose is more likely to be effective, and more likely to be attended. (Cosapien allows you to capture the purpose for every meeting series.)

Send out the purpose, along with the invite and agenda. Repeat the purpose at the start of the meeting.

Should your meeting become side-tracked, the purpose allows you to easily steer it back on course.

How necessary is this meeting?

Is the meeting necessary at all? It might sound crazy, but many things can get done without a meeting, and this is one of the most useful productivity tips you can master. (If it can be done without a meeting, it is oft best done without a meeting.) Take the time to consider whether there are other ways to achieve your purpose.

It is often a good idea to check with your superior that they agree that your purpose is important and aligned with the needs of the company. This serves the double purpose of also aligning your work with what your superior considers to be important.

Constrain the meeting

Determine the absolute minimum amount of people needed to achieve your purpose. Only these people should be invited to the meeting. Everyone else who is important, but not critical should be on the distribution list. Check for overlap. Ie, if there are two people with largely overlapping skill then only 1 of them need to be in the meeting.

A key piece is that attendees need to have the mandate to make/approve the decisions to be taken in the meeting. Sometimes a key decision maker will want to send a representative to the meeting. Only allow fully empowered representatives. Otherwise, decisions taken will constantly be reversed. If that is not possible, run the meetings without the representative, put the key decision maker on the distribution list, and give a task to a person in the meeting to get approval on certain decisions before the next meeting.

Determine the absolute minimum amount of time needed to achieve your purpose. Add time allocations to agenda item titles, e.g., “Opening (5 min)”. This will help keep a tight schedule, and also helps people understand the weighting of the different sections.

This combination of attendees (per hour rate) and time constraints allows you to measure the cost of your meeting. You can measure the RoI by reflecting that against the purpose of the meeting.

Constraining increases the effectiveness of meetings by

• Makes conversations quicker, and more easily kept on point
• Minimises cost to company

Come prepared

Pre-minute the meeting:

• It prepares the chair better for their meeting.
• This is especially important if the chair is also the scribe, as it minimises interruptions.

Bonus tip: Ask the person responsible for each section to mail the scribe their pre-minuted section before the meeting (including presentations, reports, etc for attachment).

Before the Meeting

• Follow-up on overdue tasks before the meeting. Ie, remind attendees of overdue tasks, and that you expect to see them addressed before the meeting.
• Send the agenda out before hand. This way all parties know what the meeting will entail, and can better prepare for the meeting.

Bonus tip: Introverts perform better when they can prepare for a meeting (ie, send out the agenda at least 24h in advance).

Develop a rhythm, ie, “this is how it is done”

Have a regular cadence for meetings. Greater productivity will result if a meeting is held at a set interval (e.g., weekly) with clear expectations of each person on what they will be reporting on each time (e.g., pipeline report and all experiments ran) with the questions that will be asked (e.g., what did you learn).

Send a clear and consistent message on expectations that before meetings the tasks either be completed or that new deadlines be agreed. (Both of which can be easily done in Cosapien.)

Minute all key decision and discussions. Do this in the 3rd person so that minutes are easily read in future. Minute as if you have no insider knowledge of the meeting, so that it can be understood in 3 months. As people change on your project, these discussions and decisions will be critical to avoid scope creep, and to maintain focus (ie, avoid wasting time on rehashing past decisions). Bonus tip: Include assumptions and reasoning in decisions, so that they make sense when revisiting them

Send the minutes out to all attendees and distributees as soon as possible after the meeting. (Cosapien automatically does this for you, as soon as you publish the meeting minutes.) This way attendees receive the minutes with their tasks while the meeting is still fresh in their minds.

Follow-up after minutes are sent out that everyone agrees to do the tasks captured in the minutes. (Integrated into Cosapien, as it splits out all task request from minutes into individual requests.) Otherwise, people arrive at the next meeting claiming that the scribe captured the task wrongly or that they didn’t know about it.

The productivity tips above will help you improve the effectiveness of your meetings. Interested in using Cosapien to help you execute on those tips? Join here.

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So what is prioritisation?

It’s the art of ranking tasks and activities in their order of importance. And while there may be the odd occasion that it warrants a judgment call, it’s primarily a simple cognitive task.

The problem comes in when, once we’ve prioritised, we start to consider everything on the to-do list as “important”. We tell ourselves that we’ll get to the less important tasks “later” but, as you probably know, later never comes around.

Remembering that your time and attention span are limited resources and, while it may be tough to admit, there is a point at which you will not be able to address all the demands that are made of you.

Prioritisation is necessary but it may not be able to get all those things done. What you need is triage. If you were a medical practitioner in a medical emergency you would be left with making the decision of who needs help immediately, who doesn’t and who’s beyond being saved.

So how do you cope?

Reframe It

Change the way you think about your never-ending to-do list. Your inbox is always going to be full, your phone will continue to ring and your personal commitments will continue to demand from you. Working longer hours is unlikely to change that.

Start Using The Right Tools

Task management tools like Cosapien enable you to prioritise to-do lists, to make critical decisions that affect productivity. Use Cosapien to help you with triage; to determine where that cut-off point is for you.

The Art Of Saying No

Declining unproductive tasks and explicitly saying “no” to people requires some emotional toughness. You may not have realised it, but when you are confronted by unreasonable demands you start to feel upset, anxious, scared. The thing is, when you are in a stressed state, you are less likely to even notice them.

The good news is that you can manage your emotional state and reactions with some simple changes:

1. Update your mental model to make allowance for the importance of emotions and the way they affect your thoughts and ability to make decisions. Your beliefs shape your experiences.

2. Take care of your physical self by getting enough sleep and regular exercise. Just making these changes can improve your ability to understand and regulate your emotions.

3. Practice the art of mindfulness. Choose a reflective process like meditation or keeping a journal so you can better direct your thoughts and gain new perspectives on your daily experiences.

4. Expand your emotional repertoire. By giving yourself access to a wider variety of words that describe how you feel, you’ll communicate more effectively with other people, and start to understand yourself better.

In summary

Prioritisation can help you to cope with the demands of work and life to a point. In order to feel more fulfilled, you need to practice three other key skills:

1. Reframe the way you understand the demands of work and life. Realise that there is no end-point when it comes to your to-do list.

2. Use better tools like Cosapien to help you with prioritisation and triage. Automating processes like prioritisation frees up your mental resources so they can be used on more important tasks.

3. Get used to saying no. Agreeing to everything that gets thrown your way is impractical and has emotional repercussions that will underpin your thoughts and behaviour.

Improve Your Emotional Resilience By:

1. Updating your mental models to make space for emotions.
2. Looking after your physical body by getting enough rest and regular exercise.
3. Practising mindfulness through medication, journaling or other self-reflexive activities.
4. Broaden your vocabulary so that you have more words available that describe how you feel. It will not only benefit the people you communicate with, but the way you understand and behave yourself.

Get your invite to Cosapien below. It will help you automate your task list and make your decision-making process more manageable day to day.

The post Time Management & The Art Of Prioritisation appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Tell People How You Would Like To Be Communicated With

Not everyone is a fan of email. Some people hate reading and writing, and find they get more done with telephone calls. Others are too busy on their feet during the day and prefer to respond to emails when they have some down time. Whatever your preference, it’s worthwhile letting others know what your preferred communications channels are. That is, of course, if you want them to use them.

Request Meeting Agendas

As we’ve said before, unproductive meetings account for a tremendous amount of wasted workplace time. If you’re invited to a meeting, request the agenda beforehand. In this way you can determine what can be address over email (or a telephone call). You can also gauge how useful attending the meeting will be to you before you commit.

Take Stock Of Who’s Been Invited

Have a look at who else has been invited to the meeting. The first question you should ask yourself is “Do I need to be there?”. The second most important question you should ask yourself is “Will the right people be there?”

If the decision-makers are not present at the meeting it’s likely to be a time waster and you’ll have to do a repeat performance for the real decision-makers.

Take Some Responsibility For Other People Arriving Prepared

It may come as a surprise but many people don’t prepare for meetings. Even those who request a meeting with you may arrive under-prepared and badly researched. And, aside from creating a bad first impression, they’ll probably waste your time too.

If you’re meeting with someone for the first time don’t be afraid to ask them what they want to discuss. It will ensure you both arrive at the meeting on the same page.

In Summary

1. Tell people how they should engage with you. Give them an incentive to use this system. If you’re not an email person and would prefer a 2 minute phone call, telling others to expect an email response in 36 hours (insert your average email turn around time here), will probably do the trick.

2. Don’t go to meetings without agendas. Uncontrolled meetings are a waste of time. Request the agenda so you can gauge how productive the meeting will be.

3. Check out the other meeting attendees. If the key decision-makers will not be there, it’s likely to be a waste of your time.

4. Screen the people who want to engage with you. If someone requests a meeting, interview or phone call, find out what it’s about. It could be 10 minutes of your life that you never get back.

Need help controlling your time management? Get an invite to Cosapien and increase your productivity today:

The post Why You Can’t Blame Other People For Wasting Your Time appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

What does it mean and, more importantly, what does it say about you? Well, the short answer is that the way you behave today is a really strong indicator of how you’ll behave tomorrow. It’s called banking on future time, and it’s pretty unusual for this type of behaviour to manifest with productive results.

It’s self-sabotaging behaviour too, because you’re not taking full advantage of the time you have available in the present moment. And, predictably, when later comes, and the task is not done, you’ll feel the ripple effects of guilt, frustration and probable burn out (by the time all those deferred tasks catch up with you). If you really want to beat procrastination read on…

How does this manifest?

You procrastinate about certain tasks, telling yourself that you will work better and more productively when you’re alone at the office. Instead what happens when everyone leaves, is that you find yourself feeling tired.

You avoid making real progress on a big project, when you have smaller windows of time, because you want to wait for a day when you have a full block of time at your disposal. Of course, that doesn’t happen. Instead you find yourself in a state of panic at the thirteenth hour, finishing your project at the last minute.

Not productive right?

So, what conscious changes do you need to make to improve your time management skills, beat procrastination and get more done?

Rule Out All Future Options

If you get into the habit of deferring tasks to weekends or after hours, you will be more likely to procrastinate. It’s more challenging to “do it later” because you will be plagued by guilt, and you’ll be tired.

So how do you fix it? Allocate times during your work day to complete specific tasks. Plan your day or week in advance by setting certain timelines to complete your tasks and projects. Extended deadlines present a greater chance of procrastination: if you’ve got an entire month to complete a presentation, for example, break the presentation up into sections and allocate a timeframe to complete each section so that the final project is ready by the end of the month.

Use Cosapien to task yourself (and other people if you’re working on a team) and allocate due dates for sub-tasks so you can complete projects on time.

This approach will help you to align your calendar with your task list with a view to helping you recognise that you will run out of time if you don’t address your projects in smaller segments. There won’t be an opportunity to defer the work to tomorrow, because tomorrow will bring a new set of tasks with it.

Book Your Free Time Up

If you have lots of free time available, you’ll be more likely to procrastinate on work tasks. Instead make sure you do have personal commitments in your free time. Start enjoying your time off. When you do, you’ll be less likely to want to use it for work commitments.

Standardise Your Schedule

You may be able to justify surfing your favourite social network all day with the promise that you’ll catch your work up later but it’s less than ideal. If you do ever get to it, your guilt will probably distract you from doing a good job, or conversely, you’ll end up with burn out from pushing yourself too hard.

So how can you hack this unproductive habit? Well you may be able to take a note from the anti-smoking handbook. Behavioural economist Howard Rachlin performed a study which showed how smokers who were told to smoke the same number of cigarettes every day were able to reduce the amount they smoked, without being told to smoke less. When smokers realised that by smoking a whole pack of cigarettes today, they would need to smoke the whole pack on subsequent days, they chose to modify their own behaviour.

Allow yourself to make the choice to invest the same number of hours to working every day. If you spend three hours on the internet today, do you want to continue this behaviour for the rest of life?

Beat procrastination , change your behaviour today and get better results tomorrow:

1. Stop banking on future time; there’s no time like the present. Align your calendar with your to-do list and allocate certain time frames to complete tasks. Tomorrow will bring with it another eight hours of productivity, but also a new set of tasks to be fulfilled.

2. Make commitments for your personal time. If your personal time is booked up with fulfilling activities, by deferring your tasks, you’ll be missing out on the things you enjoy.

3. Reduce variance in your schedule and routinise the way you spend the hours in your day. Your behaviour today will determine your behaviour tomorrow. Do you want to spend the rest of your days at work and the rest of your nights working?

Need help routinising your day? Receive an invite to Cosapien, beat procrastination and maximise your productivity.

The post “I’ll Do It Tomorrow”: Time Management Tips To Beat Procrastination appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

So it’s not surprising that the vast majority of Fortune 500 executives and VIPs interviewed by Daniel J Levitin, a neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author, don’t feel frantic or disorganised despite having so many responsibilities. He says that their levels of organisation enable them to be “in the moment”, that they stress less and they aren’t trying to beat the clock.

Some of them have assistants and external help- teams of people who help them decide what the most effective way for them to spend their time is. But there’s more to it than that and good news at that- multi-tasking really is not the most effective way to get more done. And even better: implementing the right systems means you don’t have to hire an entire staff entourage to help you through it. Here’s how.

Get Your To-Do List Out Of Your Head

Using a task management system like Cosapien enables you to engage with your to-do list outside of your head. This takes the weight of mental organisation off your shoulders- and places it into an automated system, which is easier for you to manage.

According to Levitin, the world’s most efficient and successful people collate all their essential information in one place (as opposed to using lots of different platforms to make notes). In his words, it’s “scattering” all your different tasks across different media, platforms and notepads that can leave you feeling “scatterbrained”, like you’ve forgotten something and ultimately feeling anxious.

Once you’ve got your list out of your head, author of Getting Things Done, David Allen, recommends that you subdivide your to-do list even further:

1. Do it
2. Delegate it
3. Defer it
4. Drop it

Why is “dealing” with it effective? Well, recording or documenting your to-do list stops you from going through rehearsal loops. A rehearsal loop is your brain’s way of trying to stop you from forgetting things- so your important tasks are thrown into a rehearsal loop to remind you about them.

Recording tasks in Cosapien gives you greater control over your to-do list. You can assign yourself tasks or delegate them to co-workers, suppliers and colleagues, while you are sitting in a meeting. You can set due dates (which assists with time management) for yourself and for others, review it once done and then move forward.

Your Most Creative Times Are Sacred

Remember that your most creative times are early in the morning, and just after breaks or exercise, so don’t waste them by booking meetings.

Cosapien collates all your task reminders for you, and for the people you have delegated tasks to. It lets you know what you need to prepare for your next meeting, as well as what colleagues and suppliers need to submit, to make progress on projects. It also encourages you to assign time to the tasks you need to complete ahead of time.

Filter Out Distractions

Sure, we may be overloaded with information, but whether we choose to engage with it is a choice. If you find yourself getting distracted too easily, it is time to start filtering out everything that is unnecessary.

If you have allocated time to complete a certain task and you do not want to be distracted by a ringing telephone or an assistant, make yourself unavailable. Assign specific times of the day to handle telephone calls, answer emails and work on certain projects. If it is not your time to answer emails, that “high importance” message will have to wait.

Decide What’s Good Enough

Set your own benchmark for what you consider to be “good enough”. And stop there. Overthinking and overdoing leads to unnecessarily high stress levels, and ultimately “wastes” your limited mental capacity on small matters. Conserve your mental energy for your biggest and most important decisions. Everything else you do should be done satisfactorily- and you are the person who gets to decide what that is. In doing what is “good enough” with minimal effort, you optimise your return on your investment.

Adapt To Change

In an ideal world everything would run according to schedule, but in the real world, it doesn’t. Having a plan is important, but it’s agility and flexibility that can help you to manage stress when things don’t run according to plan. Ritualising your life conserves mental energy and gets optimal use from your precious cognitive resources. When you are under stress, the rituals are especially important.

Cosapien allows you to update tasks and due dates, and to issue early warnings when there is a chance a due date may not be met.

Allocate Spaces For Specific Mental States

The research tells us that a messy desk really does reflect a messy state of mind, so maintaining organisation outside of your head can influence what goes on inside it.

When you need to focus on something really important, have a dedicated space available, so you aren’t distracted by ringing phones and colleague conversations.

If you found this article interesting, Cosapien’s time management and meeting minuting capabilities will work for you. Get an invite below.

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Why Do We Even Have Meetings? Aren’t They A Waste Of Time?

Yes, meetings have value- maybe even more so now than they did 20 years ago. As organisations rely on more diverse opinions and need to adopt agile decision-making processes, meetings enable strategic decisions to be made quickly and by the relevant parties. That is, of course, if you can keep them on track.

The meeting is only the beginning of a longer process to realize organisational objectives. The minutes need to call everyone to action and actualize the parameters surrounding the tasks required. The meeting minutes need to extrapolate the decisions that were taken and assign the necessary roles so that tasks can be carried out.

Let’s take a look at some of the fundamentals of taking minutes, and how to retain control of a meeting.

Preparation And Pre-Minuting: Control the Meeting

Usually when minutes are hand-written or typed into a template, it helps if the person taking the minutes does not have a major role in the meeting. Otherwise his or her focus becomes split and the minutes may not be accurate.

When you work with Cosapien, all the essential fields are captured for you, so all you have to do is fill in the information relevant to your discussion. Because the structure is taken care of, the person hosting the meeting can still capture the minutes and retain control.

The Critical Information

Effective minutes should include:

• The meeting date and time
• The purpose of the meeting
• The name of the chair or meeting lead, as well as the attendees
• The action items and who they are assigned to
• Details of the decisions captured.

Don’t Reach For The Pen And Paper

Why not? Well if you are writing your notes down, you can’t go back and re-order or re-prioritise your points. You might need to add some detail to a discussion that is three points up. You also have to contend with rushed handwriting and illegibility.

Don’t Take Minutes Verbatim

Why not? It’s neither humanly possible nor optimal, no matter how fast your PA or secretary might shorthand or type out, to get it down word for word. Focus on the actual discussion points, not what is being said. Record the decisions being taken and who is responsible for tasks being actioned.

Don’t Wait Until After The Meeting To Finalise The Minutes

Why not? It’s vital that you take minutes during the meeting not afterwards. You run a greater risk of making mistakes and omitting important information if you try to reconstruct the discussion from memory. Review your notes straight after the meeting and get clarity on any points you may not have understood. It is also a good idea to do this when everyone can still remember the events and discussions vividly. It is recommended that the meeting lead has a chance to review the minutes before they are circulated or published. Why not share the minutes on a projector at the end of the meeting to get approval from the group?

Take control of your meetings today and test our time-saving tips. Sign up for a free, no-obligation trial and see how taking care of the minutes can add hours to your organisational productivity.

The post 5 Time-Saving Tips To Take Better Meeting Minutes appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.