The Art of Doing

11 Tips for Having Great Meetings from
Some of the World’s Most Productive People

A recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 800 hours a year, for a grand total of 4 years of your life over your career. Here are 10 strategies to get your office meeting off life support. Plus a bonus tip on meetings from Mark Zuckerberg.

meetingsMark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Nilofer Merchant, Clay Shirky, Valentina Rice, Guy Kawasaki and others, know about getting things done, being productive and keeping a crowd engaged. So when they talk, we should listen.

recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 800 hours a year. For a grand total over an entire career of–are you sitting down?–37,440 hours of meetings. That’s more than 4 years of your precious time.

There are few tried and true strategies for running productive meetings: Be prepared, have a leader, an agenda, a fixed time to start and stop, a conclusion and plan to follow up. But if we have to sit around in a windowless conference room for 9,000 hours, can’t we come up with something more . . . engaging?

Here are 10 strategies to get your office meeting off life support. Plus a bonus tip on meetings from Mark Zuckerberg: Continue reading “11 Tips for Having Great Meetings from
Some of the World’s Most Productive People”

Podcast: “The Art of Doing” on BlogcastFM

Srinivas Rao, a prolific podcaster (and passionate surfer), who has interviewed everyone from Guy Kawasaki to Seth Godin, shares our interest in process, writing and the underpinnings of success. Rao interviewed us about our book “The Art of Doing” on BlogcastFM.

art of doing podcastSrinivas Rao, a prolific podcaster (and passionate surfer), has interviewed everyone from Guy Kawasaki (who we also interviewed for our book) to Seth Godin. Srini’s BlogcastFM podcast is downloaded half a million times monthly. And since Srini shares our interest in process, writing and the underpinnings of success, we had a lively discussion with him not just about what we’ve learned interviewing the 36 high achievers for our book, but also art-of-doing-boxabout our book’s origin story, how we put the book together, our marketing influences, how we feel about fiction and even how our 7-year old daughter relates to our book, blog and the business of “The Art of Doing.” (She talks it up at dinner parties but has initiated an “Art of Doing Free Zone” during family time and created an “Art of Doing Idea Box” should an Art of Doing idea occur to someone while we’re in that zone. Maybe everyone needs an idea box?)

You can listen to our conversation on BlogcastFM: here.

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