Productivity | Justin Levy

Meetings Are Broken

October 12, 2010 By Justin Levy 5 Comments

In most companies meetings are broken. You and I both know it. We organize and attend meetings that take too long, are unstructured, involve too much rambling and not enough follow-up. We meet for the sake of meeting, not out of necessity. We allow individuals to hijack the meeting so it takes twice as long as it is supposed to. For the few minutes per day that we’re not in meetings, we’re being consistently interrupted. Yet, we’re still expected to complete all of our work on time even if we spend the majority of our life in meetings.

Does this sound like a conversation you might have had recently with a co-worker?

I know this has happened to me. I know that I’ve been both the culprit and victim of broken meetings. But, lately, I have become increasingly restrictive of how easy I’ll agree to a meeting without questioning the need to meet and the length of time required. Too often, as I’m sure you’ve experience, hour long meetings are scheduled because it sounds like a nice, round number.

Meetings don’t have to be the source of this much frustration. Meetings don’t have to zap your team’s productivity. Meetings don’t have to suck!

Now, this isn’t to say that meetings aren’t necessary. They are very much needed, when they’re structured, are respectful of your time, involve follow-up, and aren’t just a meeting to meet about the last meeting you had.

If you’re stuck in an organization that enjoys meeting just to meet, how can you fix it? How can you regain back your precious time?

Merlin Mann has come to the rescue once again. A few years ago he began preaching from tall mountains on how each of us could regain control on our inboxes with his, now famous, Inbox Zero speech. Now Merlin wants to help you fix broken meetings so that they return to be useful allocations of your time.

Merlin recently publicly rolled out this new presentation during a session at Twitter HQ. The entire presentation is a little more than an hour long but is worth every minute of your time.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Merlin shares 10 patterns for improving meetings.

10 Patterns to Improve Meetings

Purpose
Agenda
Grazing
Edges
Guests
Timekeeper
No Ratholes
Focus
Follow-Up
Consistency

What are your thoughts about broken meetings? Did you find a nugget or two of actionable information that you can take back to your organization and implement?

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Photo Credit: Kevin Lawyer

Filed Under: Productivity, Videos Tagged With: focus, meetings, organization, Productivity, Videos

12 Cloud-Based Tools to Stay Productive

July 23, 2010 By Justin Levy 3 Comments

When I was at my old company I had a large outsourced team based in the Philippines. Since I was only able to make it out there once every 10 weeks or so, we had to rely on tools that would allow us to transfer reports and communicate with one another from close to 18,000 miles away. At the time this was primarily done via email, IM and FTP. That feels so long ago because now, just a few years ago, we have seen a sharp increase in cloud-based tools for individuals and businesses. At the heart of these tools is the goal to keep people connected by allowing for access to data and the ability to easily communicate through a variety of channels.

I utilize cloud-based apps all throughout my day and didn’t realize just how much I rely on them until I sat down and began thinking about how I store and retrieve personal data and how I communicate with a number of team members, clients, and partners on a daily basis.

Here are the top 12 cloud-based tools that I use to stay productive. I use many other tools as well but these are the tools I wouldn’t know what to do without.

12 Cloud-Based Tools to Stay Productive

Google Apps/Docs: I use Google Apps at both New Marketing Labs and my steakhouse. I also heavily use Gmail and Google Docs in my personal life.
Google Bookmarks: Google Bookmarks ensures that I have access to my most frequently used bookmarks from any computer, anywhere I’m at. I also use Delicious but I use that more for storage and curating together lists such as corporate social media policies or food recipes.
Google Reader: Google Reader is the primary way I’m able to consume so much information on a daily basis. There are a variety of tools available for the iPhone and iPad plus I can access from any computer with a browser.
Mozy: Mozy allows me to sleep at night knowing that all of my data is being backed up. I have other backup processes in place including external hard-drives and heavy use of Dropbox but Mozy remains at the center of all of these processes.
Backupify: Just as Mozy allows me not to worry about the data that’s stored on my computer(s), Backupify ensures that my social media data is backed up and available for future reference. Backupify can secure your data from a variety of services including: Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Apps/Docs, WordPress, Basecamp, Gmail, Facebook, Google Calendar, and many more.
Dropbox: Dropbox keeps my most used files available to me wherever I am. Not only does this serve as a backup of those files, it also allows me to access from my iPhone, iPad, or any other computer. This comes in handy all the time and helps me to stay responsive to business requests for copies of files.
Evernote: I have been a fan of Evernote since it was first launched. I have multiple notebooks that I use for all sorts of things including my task management, goal setting, lists of all kinds, and random notes.
Hootsuite: While technically I could’ve listed all of the different social platforms, I would like to think that would be sort of obvious. However, Hootsuite is important because it allows me to stay connected on too many Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages to count.
Yammer: We’re just deploying Yammer at New Marketing Labs but it is being used to keep our team connected so that we’re not constantly interrupting each other and so that we can stay in contact when we’re traveling. We had used other internal networks such as Socialcast and they worked great but a few of our partners were already using Yammer so we decided to give it a try. So far, it’s pretty awesome!
ScrewTurn: ScrewTurn is what we use for our corporate wiki where we keep information on just about everything we do including our policies, timelines, meeting notes, discussions and lots of other great uses we’re finding for it.
Zoho: When we first launched New Marketing Labs we bounced around between a few CRMs and finally settled on Zoho. I wanted a full-featured platform because I had spent 3 years as the administrator of NetSuite at my old company but we didn’t have the needs of, for example, a software company that has hundreds or thousands of leads coming in each day.
GoToMeeting: Even though Citrix Online is a client of mine, I have been using GoToMeeting for years. I already travel a lot. If it wasn’t for GoToMeeting, I would have to rent a closet at an airport because I would never be home.

What are some of your favorite cloud-based tools to stay productive and keep connected?

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Photo Credit: bestrated1

Filed Under: Communications, Productivity, technology Tagged With: cloud-based tools, Communications, organization, Productivity, software, technology

Are We Addicted to Interruptions?

July 18, 2010 By Justin Levy 6 Comments

An issue in many offices is that the real work gets done outside of the office, either early in the morning, at nights or on the weekends because team members are in meeting after meeting during regular work hours. Those meetings typically only add more to the to-do list and also soak up time that could otherwise be spent being productive working on projects. When not in a meeting, the remainder of the day is filled with interruptions, emergencies that usually aren’t true emergencies, and just simply trying to get settled in to actually get into a flow.

Right about this point you’re probably nodding your head up and down admitting that you’re experiencing this same issue. It’s not surprising because the modern workplace has become addicted to meetings and other forms of interruptions.

This is a consistent issue for me even though my team tries to run as lean as possible and reduce the number of meetings and miscellaneous interruptions we have. However, when I’m not traveling, a normal week will have 40-60 meetings appear on my calendar. One of the reasons for this is because we’re a fast-growing company with big ambitions and a lot of moving projects that require our attention while the other part is that we have weekly status calls with each of our clients and I lead the majority of these calls.

As more meetings and interruptions have continued to find their way into my work day, I’ve learned to block out time on my calendar that is marked “DO NOT SCHEDULE!” This allows me to schedule blocks of time to get work done instead of only small windows of time.

With how often I travel, I’ve also learned how to be productive from anywhere and how to leverage any time available even if it is only 15 minutes. This has lead me to become very good at getting work done with short pockets of time in between meetings and at home. Even if I have a day without a lot of meetings, I have found that I am more productive on projects when I’m workshifting because I find that I can focus more because it’s just me, my laptop and some great music.

Just as I was thinking about this while sitting on my couch doing work on a Sunday afternoon, I came across an interview with Jason Fried,co-author of Rework (affiliate link) and Founder of 37Signals where he addresses exactly this issue. Jason describes some of the tactics that his team uses at the 37Signals office and offers some tactical advice that you could implement into your office.

Have you broken your company of their addiction to meetings and other interruptions? If so, what were the tactics you used?

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Filed Under: Business, Communications, Productivity, Videos Tagged With: Business, Communications, meetings, Productivity, Videos

Slaying the Inbox

June 28, 2010 By Justin Levy 10 Comments

A consistent theme through many of the conversations I have regarding productivity, work/life balance and time management focuses on the never-ending deluge of emails that many of us are receiving nowadays. In addition to more and more email piling in, we’re being expected to and judged by how fast we can respond to said emails.

This is a constant battle that I fight on a daily basis. The first thing I do when my alarm goes off is grab my iPhone and check what emails have come in over the past few hours. This continues throughout the rest of the day and ends with a last check of my iPhone right before placing it back on the nightstand where I grabbed it at the start of the day. I know, I know, the productivity cops are coming after me as we speak for saying the first thing I do is check email. For me, it helps to set the pace for the day and allows me to prioritize the morning especially if something happened with a client. On any given day I receive 200-300 emails and send upwards of 100+ emails per day. Between my laptop, iPhone, and iPad, I ensure that I’m consistently plugged in and attempting to stay on top of my inboxes.

Of course, sometimes I fall off the wagon and fall deeply, deeply behind where I have to spend an entire day catching up. Whenever this happens, I tend to fire up Merlin Mann‘s famous “Inbox Zero” talk. Have you seen it before? If not, check out the video below. Though it is about an hour long, it is worth every second of your time, especially if you’re having problems organizing or keeping up with your inbox.

What I’ve found is that I can’t use the exact folders that Merlin suggests because I find that when I tried using a “Defer” and/or “Do” folder, I never followed up with the emails. Also, after trying out a few different folder structures, I decided that what helped me process (and reference) email the fastest was to use the following folders for my primary inbox, which happens to be my New Marketing Labs account:

External – this is for all communications that are not from a client or someone on the New Marketing Labs team.
Clients – all client emails go into this folder.
Internal – any email from a New Marketing Labs team member is kept in this folder.
Misc. – any email that doesn’t nicely fit into one of the other folders or may be a personal note that I want to save for personal reference is stored here.
Travel – because of how much I travel, I’m always receiving travel confirmations, updates and changes. Though I heavily depend on TripIt to keep my travel organized, I keep all backups here.

This allows me to quickly decide where an email needs to be stored instead of spending 5 seconds per email deciding exactly which of 100 folders it needs to go in. It also helps me with trying to locate a reference email because of how fast email searches are nowadays and the variety of ways that your email can be sorted.

This is just how I attempt to slay the inbox. How do you handle your email?

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Photo Credit: Christopher S. Penn

Filed Under: Email, Productivity, Videos Tagged With: Email, Productivity, Videos

When You Hit the Wall

September 1, 2009 By Justin Levy 13 Comments

This was originally posted on workshifting.com (a client project) but thought these tips could be useful to you over here as well.

You can always feel it coming. You sit in front of your computer and stare at it blankly. Watching Top Gun for the 15th time somehow makes sense. Polishing your silverware sounds fun. You even shut down IM, Facebook and Twitter. What’s going on? You, my friend, have hit the wall. You have hit a wall where you are totally unproductive. So, what do you do? Do you accept your fate and take some time off? Or do you decide to fight through it and see if you can get back onto the fast track of productivity?

Sometimes it can be that your morning just got started off on the wrong foot. That’s easy to correct. At the far extreme, it can mean that you’ve hit burnout. Just a bit of advice: try to avoid the burnout side of the spectrum. Other times, it’s that you fall in between those two ends and just have an all around unproductive day. You can’t exactly put your finger on why but all you know is that you’re just being unproductive. Suddenly it’s night time and you can’t really account for what really got done during the previous 12 hours.

Let’s face it. As much as some of us don’t want to admit it, we all need to take a break occasionally. If your family doesn’t force you to, eventually your body and/or mind will. It’s natural especially if you keep laser focus and pride yourself on the lack of sleep you get. Sometimes you have to just accept your fate and enjoy a day off of the grid and away from the normal grind. But, other times you have to have a few sure-fire ways to give your day that shock needed to get back on track. Here are the 9 ways that I help get my day back from careening out of control:

1. Turn on or switch up the music. Music is a major part of my life. It always has been. So, I have to have music on whenever I want to get a lot done. Sometimes though, just turning on music isn’t enough. That’s when I have to smash the emergency glass and pull of the musical first-aid kit. This entails precisely of my Bose ear-in headphones, Pandora ONE and/or iTunes. The music has to be something with a great beat and hard hitting bass. For me, Jay-Z is usually my go-to artist of choice.

2. Try for a couple small wins. Try to accomplish some of the smaller, easier tasks on your list. Maybe that’s paying a bill or two. Send out that rebate. Make those 3 phone calls you’ve been meaning to make. I find that being able to cross a few of those off the list will usually be the injection of productivity needed to switch focus to the bigger projects.

3. Break the big projects down to small tasks. In my opinion, this is what you should be doing all the time. But, we all forget and instead add “Take on the world” to our task list. It’s no wonder that it keeps getting pushed off. We find it to be daunting so we skip past it and move on to a bunch of smaller wins. Instead of pushing it down the list, use your GTD ninja skills and break it into all of the smaller tasks needed to make the big win. If you’ve forgotten about GTD, you can give yourself a refresher by watching David Allen present at Google. I’ll sometimes make these tasks as micro as “Photocopy contract”, “Email contract”, “Send internal status update on contract”. Again, it’s those small wins that will help you get back on track.

4. Switch locations. Sometimes it’s not you but your environment that’s making you unproductive. Try workshifting from a different location. If it’s a nice day, grab your laptop and go outside. Head to a coffee shop or a restaurant. Find those go-to locations for yourself and head straight there. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

5. Drop the internet and put your hands up. Even if you don’t think it is, the internet can suck up time. Those little minute distractions of TweetDeck‘s little black status box popping up or your email yelling at you that you have 10 unanswered emails can really prevent you from focusing. So, when you really need to crack the whip, start by shutting down EVERYTHING that can interrupt you. Yes, that means, email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, cell phone, anything and everything. I like to switch up locations and go somewhere that I know I won’t have internet. It helps me to focus and allows me to be creative.

6. Get up and stretch. I find that stretching revitalizes me. It helps to unkink the muscles that have just sat there for hours on end. A few cracks here, a few stretches there and I feel like I can conquer the world again. If this doesn’t work, try going for a workout or take a quick shower. These little refreshers will help to make you feel better and gives you a few minutes to clear your mind before diving back in.

7. Take on something else. If it’s work-related tasks that you’re not able to crush, try knocking off something else. I recently had an entire weekend where anything and everything work-related seemed like a foreign language to me. Instead of just wasting the day away, I did a bunch of tasks around the house and ran a few errands. This made me feel like I was accomplishing something and also helped me for the week to come.

8. Try calling a friend. Some of my best work is done when I can co-work with someone. Invite a friend over, meet at a bookstore or try a co-working space and knock out some work together. The tools that many of us are equipped with such as laptops, broadband cards, phones and the like allow us to be digital nomads. Take advantage of it.

9. Power nap. Close everything up and take a 20 minute nap. Power naps have been proven to increase productivity. Some companies, like Google, even provide nap rooms for their employees. So, close the laptop, grab your stuffed animal (er, um, I mean, pillow), set an alarm for 20-30 minutes and pass out. If you can’t fall asleep, run head first into a brick wall. It might knock you out for a little longer than 20 minutes but you’ll probably wake up feeling refreshed. You might even hit your head hard enough to forget about some of your worries

These are just a few of a number of different tools I keep at-the-ready to help beat a feeling of being unproductive. Even if I’m feeling totally productive, I will use some of these tips to help keep me pointed in the right direction. Other times, just stop. Take some time off and relax. Your work isn’t going anywhere, that’s for sure.

Do you find these tips useful to you? What do YOU do when you’re feeling unproductive?

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Photo by: u2slane

Filed Under: Personal, Productivity Tagged With: burnout, Personal, Productivity