Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Month: February 2021
People who are habitually late (or are late even once, when it counts) project incompetence, self-centeredness, and even a lack of integrity.
This article provides 10 useful tips to be on time every time:
- Have a central place where your time commitments are recorded, whether that’s an online calendar, Outlook, a smartphone, a dayplanner, or just an index card with your schedule on it.
- Don’t schedule events that aren’t that important to you. A lot of the time we let ourselves show up late because the event we’re showing up to isn’t all that important to us.
- Don’t check your email or voicemail right before you leave. That “last quick check” will almost always take more time than you think. If you thought there’d be nothing important in your email, you wouldn’t bother checking.
- Plan for trouble. Always add 25% to your time estimate to get anywhere or do any task.
- Set up the night before. If you are someone who has a hard time getting going in the morning, make sure you set up the night before.
- Set your clocks ahead a few minutes each — by different amounts.
- Learn to better estimate how much time things take. Use a time tracker app to learn how long typical tasks take you to complete. Record these times, and refer to your record when estimating the time needed for similar tasks.
- Schedule events 10 minutes early. Always have 10 minutes of work with you to fill the slack time.
- Set reminders. Use your calendar program’s built-in reminder function to send you text reminders at set intervals before each appointment.
- Schedule events for “off-peak” times. Learn the times that traffic or other factors might make you late, and avoid scheduling during those times. For instance, give yourself at least an hour to get settled in every morning before your first meeting, don’t schedule meetings immediately after lunch, avoid before-working-hours events, etc.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
The only constant in life is change. but are you prepared to handle any change on your workplace? Change is what ultimately drives growth, so you have to be willing to accept it.
Until you recognize that change is going to happen, and get over the frustration that comes with it, you won’t be able to effectively manage your business. This isn’t to say change is no longer problematic after you learn to accept it, but it does become easier to deal with.
From a management and leadership perspective, managing change is a major challenge. Not only is technology advancing at a rapid pace, but the infusion of millennials into the workplace means ideologies and approaches are changing. There’s an entirely new perspective on what work entails and the role people and businesses play in carrying out particular tasks.
This article provides 5 powerful ways to better confront change:
1. Prepare for Multiple Outcomes
The very nature of change is such that you can’t predict or control what happens. The best thing you can do is stop trying to guess what will happen. Instead, you should place as many small bets as you can on a variety of different outcomes. By preparing for multiple outcomes in a scenario, you’re essentially hedging your bets. You’re ensuring that you don’t get caught in a situation where you’re unprepared or unable to move.
2. Quiet Your Limbic System
The limbic system responds to uncertainty with a knee-jerk fear reaction, and fear inhibits good decision-making. Fear is a big part of change. Once you’re able to deal with the fear component of the equation, your decision making will naturally become more rational and calculated.
3. Get Over the Pursuit of Perfection
Between little things and big responsibilities, we’re all making a handful of mistakes on a daily basis. The sooner you get over the notion that you can or should be perfect, change will come easier. You’ll put less pressure on yourself and be more willing to confront the challenges and decisions that await you.
4. Prioritize People Over Processes
You really need to have strong relationships with people you can trust. Together, you can use your collective knowledge, experience, and creativity to tackle these new issues. Prioritize people over processes and you’ll be better off almost every time.
5. Know Your Limits
When you know what you can and can’t do, you’re able to hand off certain responsibilities and processes to other people who are better prepared to handle a specific element of change. It can be humbling to do this, but it’s usually what’s best for the company.
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Image Source: Pixabay – freestocks-photos
Have you ever seen or experienced something and wished you spoke up?
In this TED Talk, the writer Sakinah Hofler makes the case for writing as a tool to help you process difficult memories and reclaim the power they may hold.
Pick up a pen or pull up a keyboard and follow along as she walks you through how to unburden your mind and inspire reflection!
When you embrace change you will begin to see it as an opportunity for growth.
We’ve all been in meetings where participants are unprepared, people veer off-track, and the topics discussed are a waste of the team’s time. These problems stem from poor agenda design. An effective agenda sets clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting. It helps team members prepare, allocates time wisely, quickly gets everyone on the same topic, and identifies when the discussion is complete. If problems still occur during the meeting, a well-designed agenda increases the team’s ability to effectively and quickly address them.
This article provides some tips for designing an effective agenda for your next meeting:
Seek input from team members. Ask team members to suggest agenda items along with a reason why each item needs to be addressed in a team setting. If you ultimately decide not to include an item, explain your reasoning to the team member who suggested it.
Select topics that affect the entire team. Team meeting time should mainly be used to discuss and make decisions on issues that affect the whole team. These are often ones in which individuals must coordinate their actions because their parts of the organization are interdependent. If the team isn’t spending most of the meeting talking about interdependent issues, members will disengage and ultimately not attend.
List agenda topics as questions the team needs to answer. A question enables team members to better prepare for the discussion and to monitor whether their own and others’ comments are on track. Finally, the team knows that when the question has been answered, the discussion is complete.
Note whether the purpose of the topic is to share information, seek input for a decision, or make a decision. It’s difficult for team members to participate effectively if they don’t know whether to simply listen, give their input, or be part of the decision making process. If people think they are involved in making a decision, but you simply want their input, everyone is likely to feel frustrated by the end of the conversation. Updates are better distributed prior to the meeting, using a brief part of the meeting to answer participants’ questions. If the purpose is to make a decision, state the decision-making rule.
Estimate a realistic amount of time for each topic. This serves two purposes. First, it requires you to calculate how much time the team will need for introducing the topic, answering questions, resolving different points of view, generating potential solutions, and agreeing on the action items that follow from discussion and decisions. Second, the estimated time enables team members to either adapt their comments to fit within the allotted timeframe or to suggest that more time may be needed. The purpose of listing the time is to get better at allocating enough time for the team to effectively and efficiently answer the questions before it.
Propose a process for addressing each agenda item. The process identifies the steps through which the team will move together to complete the discussion or make a decision. Agreeing on a process significantly increases meeting effectiveness. Unless the team has agreed on a process, members will, in good faith, participate based on their own process. The process for addressing an item should appear on the written agenda.
Specify how members should prepare for the meeting. Distribute the agenda with sufficient time before the meeting, so the team can read background materials and prepare their initial thoughts for each agenda item ahead of time.
Identify who is responsible for leading each topic. Someone other than the formal meeting leader is often responsible for leading the discussion of a particular agenda item. This person may be providing context for the topic, explaining data, or may have organizational responsibility for that area. Identifying this person next to the agenda item ensures that anyone who is responsible for leading part of the agenda knows it before the meeting.
End the meeting with a plus/delta. If your team meets regularly, two questions form a simple continuous improvement process: What did we do well? What do we want to do differently for the next meeting? Investing five or ten minutes will enable the team to improve performance, working relationships, and team member satisfaction.
The Diplo calendar 2021 realized by Stefano Baldi reveals some lesser known places in Italy and presents a selection of quotes referred to the role music in our everyday life.
Here is the selected quotation for the month of February:
The music is not in the notes but in the silence between
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Recent Comments