In This Episode…
After deciding in yesterday’s episode that I’d be focusing on developing my productivity behaviour around meetings, in this episode I share my experiences of today and how I let “stuff” get in the way of working on this next phase of my development.
I identify the key problems I need to solve and highlight the areas where the solutions may lie.
Episode Transcript (Edited)
Hi, and welcome to today’s episode of the Profit Productivity Podcast. It’s your host, Michael Tipper. Who else would it be?
In yesterday’s episode, I talked about how having decided to raise my standards and up my game, I decided to focus on how I approach meetings.
This is because the meeting I had yesterday morning remained un-actioned and unprocessed for the best part of the day.
Today, my intention was to follow up on that meeting, to clear the actions, to work out what would be good habits and good behaviours and good routines.
But I didn’t.
The day ran away with me.
I did my normal routine in the morning. I did my LinkedIn processing and then went straight into a zoom meeting.
Then I had an hours break where I needed to do some other stuff.
I then had a live socially distanced lunch meeting and then a call this afternoon. That was followed by a training session (I’m developing my sales skills). And I’ve had to do some other things too in between.
I Let The Day Take Control Rather Than Me Control The Day
And all of a sudden the day has run away from me.
My intention was to research some good meeting practices and to gather the good practices I’ve used myself in the past to identify how to move forward.
But I didn’t.
I started by mapping out the flow of a meeting and looking at the various components because I’m an analyst, I’m an engineer, I’m a process and systems kind of guy.
I looked at it and started thinking about it, but then got caught up in the activities of the day.
Now, this I think is fundamental to what’s going on here is I didn’t get focused in deciding what I was going to do.
I made more of an effort than I have in the past, but not enough to really move this forward because there are other competing things that are going on.
But as I said yesterday, I need to raise my game. I need to up my standards so that I can operate at a much higher level and just letting these things drift on isn’t the way forward.
Here Are The Problems I’m Trying To Fix
So if I come back to looking at meetings, I think it’s really important for me to identify the problems I’m trying to fix.
So the first one is that the meetings I’ve attended tend to be a little bit woolly, a little bit unfocused.
The second thing is they seem to be left hanging after I finished. And this is my problem. I’m not capturing what has been agreed. I’m not capturing what the actions are and then I’m not following up.
So these are the problems I need to solve.
Now I might need to go and have a look at why those are the case. However, I think it just comes down to bad habits and just letting things run away and being overwhelmed by the vast amount of things I need to do.
It’s because I haven’t got clear enough on what I want to get focused on.
I Need To Focus On Principles, Resources & Behaviours
I do know I need to understand the principles I want to apply to having effective meetings.
I’ve got to look at the resources I need t put in place.
And then more importantly, I’ve got to look at the behaviours I need to adopt around the setting up and the accepting of meeting invitations, the running of meetings and what happens post meeting.
That’s what I need to do.
So that’s what I’m going to focus on over the next few days.
I’ve made an attempt to do it today, but it hasn’t quite been as successful as I would have liked.
But this is part of the process. I’m learning about myself as I go forward as I share these thoughts with you, because it is embarrassing.
I’ve decided I was going to do something and then I just let it drift because I allowed the day to take over.
In time, I’ll learn to develop the routines and the habits of the process so that doesn’t happen again.
But this is where I am.
I’m sharing that with you because I want to develop, and this gives me a degree of accountability by sharing it with you.
And hopefully you’ll also learn something from this as you see how the evolution of my approach to handling meetings comes to light.
So that is today’s episode.
Until tomorrow.
