15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management pdfdrive com

In Their Own Words…
Never take meetings unless someone is writing a check.
–Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks,
a serial entrepreneur, and an investor
on the TV show Shark Tank.
Dustin Moskovitz’s No Meeting Wednesdays!
If you think Mark Cuban’s advice is a bit extreme or impractical, perhaps you
can swear off meetings for one day a week.
In an interview for this book, Dustin Moskovitz shared his “NMW”
productivity hack, which he brought with him from Facebook.

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In Their Own Words…
Pick one day a week that you and your team can focus on getting individual work done without any
interruptions like meetings. At Asana, we have
No Meeting Wednesdays
established to encourage flow
and productivity across the company.
–Dustin Moskovitz is the co-founder of
team productivity
app Asana and co-founder of Facebook.
Others have taken to this one-day meeting reprieve and called them “Maker
Days.” The idea is that everyone leaves everyone else alone to focus on
“making” stuff—especially if it’s making progress on their most important task
(MIT).
How to Design Effective Meeting Agendas
If you have to have a meeting, highly successful people know that effective
meetings begin with effective agendas, which are circulated in advance. Secrets
to creating effective agendas include:
Seek input on the agenda from participants before the meeting, so
new topics don’t crop up and derail the primary goal.
Clearly state the purpose of the meeting.
Clearly state who the facilitator is.
Identify all invited participants. The fewer the better, but you also
want to make sure a key person isn’t being forgotten. Google tries
to limit meeting participants to ten or fewer. Steve Jobs was
known to throw people out of the room if they couldn’t come up
with a good reason for being there.
List agenda topics as questions whenever possible in order to
focus the participants on decision-making.
Attach time estimates to each agenda item so participants can
monitor the progress and pace of the meeting; make sure time
estimates are realistic.
Google Ventures’ Secret Weapon
Jake Knapp, design partner at Google Ventures, is an advocate for using a
physical clock to count down the time remaining in a meeting. He discovered a
specific type of timer, called the Time Timer, while visiting his child’s
classroom.

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Teachers have been known to call it “The Magic Clock.” Coming in various
sizes—for about $25 from Amazon.com—the Time Timer is battery powered
and large enough to be seen by meeting participants from across a room. A red
disc silently spins, showing the amount of time remaining. Why not just set a
timer
on
your
smartphone?
As
Knapp
wrote
on
Medium
(
https://medium.com/@jakek
):
The Time Timer is WAY better than a timer app on a screen. Because it’s
physical, it’s easier to adjust and set, and absolutely impossible to ignore.
During her time at Google, Marissa Mayer was known for using a projector
attached to a laptop to display a giant count-down timer up on the wall of the
meeting room. I can only assume she still uses this practice at Yahoo!
The Steve Jobs Meeting Method
In 1999, a team of psychologists conducted research on the difference between
sit-down and stand-up meetings across 56 different groups. As reported in the
Journal of Applied Psychology:
Sit-down meetings were 34 percent longer than stand-up meetings, but
they produced no better decisions than stand-up meetings.
In a different study, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis
determined that standing meetings were far better than sit-down meetings in
terms of outcomes. They reported in Social Psychological & Personality Science
that stand-up meetings led to better collaboration and less possessiveness of
ideas, higher levels of engagement, and more problem-solving creativity.
I still remember the first time I sold one of my businesses. Rudy Karsan was
the CEO of the acquiring company, and in my very first visit to his corner office,
he jumped up before I could sit and said, “Let’s go for a walk!” Thirty minutes
later, we shook hands on a $2 million deal.
Richard Branson isn’t into traditional meetings either. He writes in his blog
(
http://www.virgin.com/author/richard-branson
):
One of my favourite tricks is to conduct most of my meetings standing up.
I find it to be a much quicker way of getting down to business, making a
decision and sealing the deal. When given the opportunity I often like to
take things a step further – literally, with a walking meeting.

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Steve Jobs was notorious for his long walking meetings, a practice that has
been adopted by Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey as well.
Marissa Mayer and Richard Branson Hold 10-Minute
Meetings
Why do all meetings seem to default to 30 minutes or one hour? It’s almost as if
people choose that duration because that’s the default time block in the Outlook
calendar. And we all know that work tends to fill up the space allocated to it.
In an interview with Bloomberg Business in 2006, when Marissa Mayer was
still with Google (she now runs Yahoo), she told the interviewer that she holds
up to 70 meetings a week. The only way she can cram them all in is to break
down the “30-minute” block into small meetings, sometimes as few as five or
ten minutes each.
Virgin founder Richard Branson often talks about his aversion to meetings. In
a blog post he shared:
It’s very rare that a meeting on a single topic should need to last more
than 5-10 minutes.