NaBloPoMo – November 2012

Ever get that brain fart when it comes to blogging? I get it all the time. Every day. I have an idea, I write it down, I look back at it, I move my butt in front of a TV instead.

Vickie of No Bad Language reminded me about NaBloPoMo. BlogHer is sponsoring it and they’ve put up a list of prompts as blog topics. Brilliant. I need something like that to keep me in check. (Not that I’m behind posts or anything…)

Welcome to November. The first prompt is: Tell us your favourite quotation and why.

As you may know, I went to the Drucker School. I like many Peter Drucker quotes on management and business. Here’s one that I like to remind myself of when I’m at a 9-5:

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better. – Peter Drucker

One of the things I’ve found most effective with meetings it to come out with action items or resolutions. It doesn’t have to be a laundry list of either, but there must be something that was moved forward in its process, there was education given, or a task was completed. If I’m in a meeting where someone ends it with “Let’s get back to work”, I know it was time lost. Some people like to hear themselves talk, and that’s ok. As long as there is an action item added or checked off, I’m ok with that. Sometimes if we end a meeting with what I think is nothing resolved or checked off, I’ll speak up and confirm who is doing what and what next steps are as a way to close it with, again, deliverables or priorities.

Then there are meetings that are just check-ins, which are shorter. I’ll ask my manager what I should do with a situation with my recommendations and our collaborating toward a solution. Sometimes they’re just updates to projects I’m working on. In the end, I rely on my manager to help me prioritize my workload in these update meetings. Who knows, my manager may have gotten a new directive and that changes things for the rest of the team. In turn, I did this with my interns and team.

The best thing form of check-ins came from my former colleague Kat. She instituted 15-Minute Mondays. You had 15 minutes to run through your top priorities. That’s 15 minutes TOTAL for the WHOLE TEAM, which, at the time, broke down to about 3 minutes each. Brilliant. Later, another manager instituted them standing up in the kitchen, which I thought was more awesome because it forced you to be less comfortable. You’re standing for 15 minutes, not hunkered down in a chair around a conference table. The standing part made it feel like you had to move quickly about your items.

There you have it – one of my favorite quotes.

The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker with Joseph Maciarello

If you’d like to learn more about Peter Drucker, there are a ton of books and news articles written about him or by him. Depending on your interest, his books can be dry. I found them to be dry while I was at school. Then again, I find all non-fiction to be dry. The Effective Executive in Action is one that I still flip through and think about. It’s more of an action journal. The Daily Drucker is also good because it has writings by Drucker and then an action for you to complete.

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