David Nyeste

Meetings, Minefields and Mindfields Today I will elaborate on why it is necessary to have a strategy for focused work. In case you don't have a clear strategy for how you can finish complicated, demanding tasks on a regular basis, you should start to think up a solution for this problem immediately. How and why I do this is revealed in the next lines. This will hopefully stay an exception, but let's start with a rant: it often strikes me with what level of ease and with what level of total disregard for people's time and schedule some colleagues invite to meetings of questionable purpose on short notice. By 'questionable purpose' I mean those meetings, where you don't have any agenda, you don't get any info on your expected input or why you're being invited in the first place and of course -the classic- : no documentation of the outcome. My impression is that as I proceed through my work-week those spontaneously created 'alignment-meetings' keep ...

How NOT To Write Emails Work without email is hardly imaginable these days. Emails have become so ubiquitous that sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself: is this still communication or is this art? I am pretty sure, what I received today was the latter. To give you the necessary context, here's how it went: Sender wrote an email to multiple TO-recipients, of which I had the privilege to be one. Subject: FWD:FWD:FWD: "<<lots of acronyms none of which I was familiar with>> contract" Content: "Hello, this with supplements of <<more cryptic acronyms>> <<27 lines of signature>>" Attachment: <<acronyms>>.xlsx Somewhere not too deep in my mind I have three simple drawers for emails:  1. do now,  2. delegate,  3. art.  Upon first scan the lights of the art-drawer immediately started to blink. But then I hesitated. I doubted. I questioned. I contemplated:"Nah! That's too easy. Let's do this old...