David Nyeste

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility Meetings have become more ubiquitous during the pandemic. I am engaged in a constant competition to manage my own time and schedule against various interests. Therefore I regularly spend a reasonable amount of time in order to contemplate on the best ways to invest my own and sometimes also my colleagues' time. The best thing I could come up with so far are a few principles that serve as checks and balances against wasting time. But before elaborating on those principles, let me give you a visceral truth about the use of your own and other people's times in a business context: "If you are conducting a one-hour meeting at your company, you have effectively stolen one hour from every person in the room. If there are twenty people in the room, your presentation is now the equivalent of a twenty-hour investment. It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that you do not waste the hour..." [Matthew Dicks, Storyworthy] The Dem...

Digital Minimalism Is Overrated Over the past years I have strived towards a more self determined digital and professional identity. Minimalism is a huge and timeless topic. Social media, video and streaming platforms, books and magazines are filled with digital and material minimalism content. It seems the present value maximizers (e.g. #yolo) are currently losing ground in the battle for attention against the end value maximizers (e.g. #firemovement). However I am convinced a focus on minimalism only misses an important point: the road to happiness in modern day's fast paced communication cycles is not a question of principle, but a question of the right balance. Hence the answer to the question of the right digital strategy, regardless whether private or professional, can not be answered by a one time decision to embrace a monk like minimalism. Rather you should continually reevaluate your options, necessities and focus on balancing your digital habits. Why I Turned Off All Push...

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 ...