In today’s five for Friday, we share five simple tips to improve the next couple of weeks ahead.
- 30:30 Rule – 30 minutes at the start of your day to review or create your to-do list of the most important actions.
30 minutes at the end of the day to review your list, write down 3 achievements and write down the important information you need to address the following business day. Removing those problems from your mind onto paper or centralise system allows you to reduce the anxiety or stress around it. - Team Or Department AMA Session – At the end of each plan out an AMA session where you, your team or department offer an AMA session for the rest of the business can ask work-related questions.
This is an excellent read to help you prepare or create company-wide AMA. - Ask your team for ideas – Many teams are looking for a chance to show off their ideas and their solutions to the problems they see. Book a time slot in where you and the team or department present their ideas and score these ideas.
Organise with a simple three-box template:
1. The problem you are solving? (How much is this costing us?)
2. Why Now?
3. The 5 things needed to make this successful?
This will help with team morale and encourage ideas and collaboration. You do not have to commit to any ideas but there will likely be a couple of brilliant ideas. - Develop out your Department Joker – as we have called out in the department joker, they are a brilliant member of your company and bring teams closer together.
Book in a time where you can arrange to develop your colleague and help them to take on more responsibility. This might seem extra work but these colleagues are often overlooked and turn out to be brilliant mentors or coaches. - 30:to:25 – Meetings are the bane of all professionals currently. Reduce your meeting defaults down from 30 to 25 minutes, reduce an hour meeting to 50 minutes. Timeboxing is the secret to getting through meetings with good agenda’s. If you are in back to backs typically this will free up at least 25 minutes per day.
Read optimise your meetings for extra help and context.