The Psychology Behind Meeting Overload
Harvard Business
NOVEMBER 12, 2021
Six biases that lead us to have too many meetings — and how to overcome them.
Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem
Harvard Business
OCTOBER 28, 2022
To fix a broken meeting culture, start by canceling everything for 48 hours.
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Parents Are Minimizing Work Relationships to Make Time for Childcare
Harvard Business
JANUARY 2, 2025
These strategies work, but they can come at a cost: some parents do not feel they have many close friends at work, do not feel a sense of belonging, and are out of the loop on workplace gossip.
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Arrange Your Meeting Schedule to Boost Your Energy
Harvard Business
AUGUST 29, 2023
Most meeting advice focuses on how to make meetings more effective or how to cut down on the number of meetings you have altogether. But what about how to schedule your meetings alongside other work tasks to best manage your productivity?
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Managing Meetings: How to Drive Productivity and Success
Tom Spencer
APRIL 12, 2024
Meetings can either be a powerful catalyst for collaboration and decision-making or a drain on time and productivity. Whether you are in consulting, strategy, operations, or product management, the ability to manage meetings effectively is a crucial skill that can significantly impact the success of your endeavors.
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It’s Not “Time Management.” It’s Lean.
Markovitz Consulting
NOVEMBER 19, 2019
The only way for them to deliver the same value in fewer hours is to eliminate the non-value added activities that typically consume large chunks of a worker’s day—think flabby meetings, worthless emails, pointless administrative tasks, unnecessary firefighting, etc.
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Recharge Your Time Management
The Clever Consultant
JULY 8, 2013
I like to come back from time-off refreshed and recharged, feeling like I’ve got everything underfoot. Every six months or so, I take the time to re-read time management books, review my workload and consider ways to more effective. Notice I didn’t say “productive”. That’s a fact. That’s enough for me.
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Polite Ways to Decline a Meeting Invitation
Harvard Business
MAY 17, 2016
There it is in your inbox: a meeting invite to a meeting you really don’t want to attend. Or it’s for a time that’s already booked, and now you’re left to decide whom to turn down. Whatever the reason, sometimes you need to decline a meeting invite. How Top Salespeople Land Hard-to-Get Meetings.
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Meetings That Work for Both Managers and Makers
Harvard Business
JULY 4, 2016
When it comes to designing and leading meetings that produce results , when you meet matters just as much as how you meet. This is particularly true in organizations where employees are both, what Paul Graham calls, “makers” and “managers.” Paul Garbett for HBR. Please do not disturb.”
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Scheduling Meetings Effectively When You’re Self-Employed
Harvard Business
MARCH 8, 2017
Without corporate mandates such as weekly team meetings or biweekly project check-ins, entrepreneurs have the ability to wipe out bureaucratic red tape and reach new heights of productivity. Here are four strategies self-employed professionals can use to schedule meetings more effectively. Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting?
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Time Management and Planning: 10 Motivations | Women In.
Women in Consulting
JULY 19, 2012
Backed by award-winning services and support teams, Blackbaud’s comprehensive set of Internet solutions, featuring Blackbaud NetCommunity and Blackbaud Sphere eMarketing along with our industry leading peer-to-peer and event fundraising solution, Friends Asking Friends , is designed to meet the evolving needs of nonprofits.
Are You Productive Enough?
Harvard Business
JULY 25, 2018
” As a time management coach, I’m keenly aware that you could answer the question “Am I productive enough?” Question 1: Am I meeting expectations? For people who have a well-defined job scope, answering this question may be easy: Did you meet the project milestones?
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Getting Your Team to Do More Than Meet Deadlines
Harvard Business
NOVEMBER 15, 2019
Here’s a system to help them set aside time for their most important work.
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7 Time Management Tips for Busy Professionals
Tom Spencer
NOVEMBER 16, 2019
You instinctively close your laptop, put on your jacket, and head out to meet your friend. Time is a scarce and valuable resource that is easy to take for granted, undervalue, or outright squander. Compared with other resources like land or money, time has three unique features. Come for dinner!” Set ambitious goals.
How to Get Your To-Do List Done When You’re Always in Meetings
Harvard Business
MARCH 15, 2019
Creative ways to find the time.
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Are Your Meetings a Priority - or are They Wasting Time?
Strategic Planning and Management Insights
DECEMBER 19, 2019
When it comes to strategic planning, every organization will go about scheduling their meetings in a different way. Regardless, having scheduled strategy progress and project management meetings will remain essential to fulfill your organizational goals and objectives.
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The Agile Family Meeting
Harvard Business
JUNE 26, 2020
A simple framework to manage chaos, get along better, and reduce stress.
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How to Establish a Meeting-Free Day Each Week
Harvard Business
FEBRUARY 28, 2017
Having a meeting-free day. Establishing one day with no meetings is a technique that I used throughout 2016 to complete a book proposal and write the manuscript for my third book. It’s also a strategy I use with my time management coaching clients. A meeting-free day isn’t the best option for everyone.
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70 If You Multitask During Meetings, Your Team Will, Too
Harvard Business
JANUARY 25, 2018
Unfortunately, managers typically have very limited visibility into what their own behaviors may be signaling to their team and how the team might be reacting. We’ve used this technology to study the behaviors of tens of thousands of managers in several large companies and found some consistent patterns. Multitasking in Meetings.
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Beware of the meeting trap: how leaders should manage their time
Brimstone Consulting
SEPTEMBER 20, 2021
Be intentional with your time. And beware of the meeting trap. Time is the scarcest resource leaders have. How a leader chooses to allocate their time is a reflection on their priorities and how they lead, and directly impacts their effectiveness and the performance of the organization. Be intentional with your time.
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61 Don’t Wait Until After the Meeting to Start Your Action Items
Harvard Business
APRIL 28, 2016
It wasn’t long after becoming a manager that I found I had landed on a seemingly endless treadmill of meetings. I was participating in so many that I barely had time to prep, let alone tackle the to-do lists I was taking away. The Seven Imperatives to Keeping Meetings on Track. You and Your Team Series.
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If You Can’t Say What Your Meeting Will Accomplish, You Shouldn’t Have It
Harvard Business
APRIL 18, 2016
How many times have you walked out of a theoretically important meeting—a leadership offsite, a C-suite pow-wow, a sit-down with the board—thinking, That was a great discussion, but I’m not sure we really accomplished anything ? We see this happen all the time when clients hire us to help manage offsites.
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Before You Set New Goals, Think About What You’re Going to Stop Doing
Harvard Business
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Reducing meetings can be a powerful force to create space for focused work. Question whether you need meetings for certain projects as well as their length and frequency. For example, going from a weekly 60-minute meeting to a biweekly 45-minute meeting can save each meeting attendee 2.5 hours a month.
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What to Do When You’re Covering for Colleagues — and Can’t Keep Up
Harvard Business
OCTOBER 9, 2018
That’s potentially more email, more tasks, more meetings, and more searching for answers to questions about items outside of your normal day-to-day. That may mean an email where they detail the status of projects, next steps, deadlines, and any key contacts, or you may have a meeting to communicate this information. Ask for help.
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Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person
Harvard Business
APRIL 6, 2017
Executives need to own up to their role in creating the workplace stress that leads to burnout—heavy workloads, job insecurity, and frustrating work routines that include too many meetings and far too little time for creative work. Weak time-management disciplines. The same is true for employee burnout.
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Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week
Harvard Business
MARCH 16, 2018
I hate meetings. And what do most meetings usually result in? You guessed it — more meetings. When I worked as Director of Leadership Development at Walmart, my days were full of meetings. When I worked as Director of Leadership Development at Walmart, my days were full of meetings. Getty Images.
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How to Stay Focused When You’re Working from Home
Harvard Business
SEPTEMBER 28, 2017
No drive-by meetings. These distractions are easy to ignore in an office, but at home it can be difficult to draw the line between personal and professional time. Before I became a time management coach, my schedule was chaotic. Your Team’s Time Management Problem Might Be a Focus Problem. No commute.
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3 Ways to Get More Done Right Now
Harvard Business
FEBRUARY 23, 2017
When I need to get something done in a hurry, I use three time management tactics to maximize my available time and sharpen my focus. In the middle of client meetings, I would sneak a peek at my phone to see whether I had received any communications. Cat Yu for HBR.
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Managing your Energy, Time, and Tasks to have a Complete Day
Tom Spencer
FEBRUARY 19, 2022
I have also found that this habit of time tracking acts as a tool to help me batch tasks (i.e. Manage your tasks. During any given workday your time will likely be spent on a combination of: Independently working. Attending meetings. Attending meetings. Also, it’s important to identify your role in each meeting.
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Better People Leader Time Management
LSA Global
OCTOBER 27, 2022
Does Your Organization Need Better People Leader Time Management? Have you ever gone through the popular new manager training exercise of logging how you actually spend your time day each day as a people leader? This is often the first step in learning how to better manage your time and be a more effective leader.
Team Interdependence for Higher Performance
LSA Global
NOVEMBER 11, 2024
If people believe that they no longer have a choice in how things are done or that counting on others would add too much risk to their ability to meet their individual performance expectations, they may resist teaming. Fear of Failure Project postmortem data tells us that relying on others can feel like a loss of control.
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3 Tips for First Time Managers
LSA Global
NOVEMBER 27, 2017
Tips for First Time Managers to Start Off on the Right Foot. Does becoming a first time manager make you feel as if you are leaping off a cliff without a safety net? If you are being promoted to a management position, you have most likely succeeded as an individual contributor. How do you spend your time?
Stop Scheduling Conference Calls and Finally Commit to Videoconferencing
Harvard Business
JUNE 29, 2018
If you knew about a technology that would help you improve organizational alignment, cut meeting times, and increase engagement in discussions, surely you’d use it all the time, right? Meetings Take Half as Long. The Seven Imperatives to Keeping Meetings on Track. Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting?
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How to transition successfully from peer to team manager
Halo Psych
FEBRUARY 10, 2025
Youre about to go from being a peer with the rest of the team, to being their manager. Ive worked with many first-time managers in exactly this position. Here are my top tips, along with some downloads to help you at the start of what I hope will be a brilliant management career. And if they can succeed, you can too.
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Why Your Productivity Hacks Don’t Hack It
Markovitz Consulting
JANUARY 12, 2021
All too often, that quest goes no further than time management training provided by the HR department. Managers meet 30 minutes after that, followed by directors, VPs, and finally the executive team. It also eliminates both countless status check emails and the need to cover that topic in meetings.
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Stress and decreased engagement are just two reasons we need to stop scheduling back-to-back meetings
Brimstone Consulting
JUNE 1, 2021
By changing how we approach meetings and how we run meetings, we can connect and communicate more effectively – and reduce stress and fatigue. One week, the study volunteers participated in four half-hour meetings that were scheduled back-to-back.
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Do You Know How Each Person on Your Team Likes to Work?
Harvard Business
MAY 30, 2017
At her next team meeting, Sveta shared a table with behaviors specific to her management style, what her actions meant, and how her team could best work with her. Each employee then shared their tables during the next team meeting, and they asked questions about others’ tables. What are some quirks about you?
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134 How to Get Your Side Hustle Off the Ground
Harvard Business
AUGUST 27, 2018
Time management issues. Almost everyone with an incipient side hustle will cite lack of time as a key reason their venture hasn’t gotten off the ground — though it’s rarely the real reason. Instead, it’s more commonly a problem of managing the time we do have.
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131 To Get More Done, Focus on Environment, Expectations, and Examples
Harvard Business
NOVEMBER 19, 2018
For the first time in my young career, I was going to lots of meetings, and my job had become as much about convincing, cajoling, and coordinating as it was about designing. My manager told me about a team that was working on the Google Help Forum. We were product managers, designers, and leaders. Have a contact contract.
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129 How to Get the Most Out of a Day Off
Harvard Business
MAY 25, 2018
Because of this, some might put off their time away, figuring they’ll get to it when their schedule isn’t so demanding, only to discover at the end of the year that they haven’t used up their paid time off. Plus, you’re likely to get more done.
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134 5 Ways to Focus at Work, from an Executive Who’s Struggled with ADHD
Harvard Business
SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
Your Team’s Time Management Problem Might Be a Focus Problem. All my short-term responsibilities are listed on it, in the order of when they’re due: sales calls, proposals, meetings, contracts, and more. If you’re meeting in person, they pick up on it through subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, cues.
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134 Track Your Time for 30 Days. What You Learn Might Surprise You.
Harvard Business
APRIL 11, 2018
Inspired by a colleague, the time management expert Laura Vanderkam , I decided to spend the month of February tracking exactly how I spent my time, down to half-hour increments. In particular, there were four that made me rethink a lot of the conventional wisdom on productivity and time management.
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