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The dog has learned to climb the stairs – all three steep flights of them. Getting down is tricky, though, given that Deerhounds have long, gangly legs and as any climber will tell you, the last thing you need when beating a hasty retreat is four long legs to arrange in sequence.

The thing with dogs, or at least your Scottish Deerhound, is that they are persistent, especially when hungry. And they are persistent with a very narrow range of tactics for success. When Fizz (sic) is hungry she works in strict sequence of opportunity according to which resources are accessible to her. It goes something like this:

1. Food bowl
2. Kitchen work surfaces
3. Waste paper baskets (apple cores, sweet wrappers, used tissues, anything else worth shredding/eating)
4. Ask to go out and patrol garden for duck eggs – especially straw bedding in duck houses
5. Final resort – eat anything spongy and filling (car washing sponges and pot scourers are more filling than they look)
6. Rest in front of the fire
7. Go to step 1

“Ha-ha, look at the silly doggy” we laugh.

“Cute but dumb” we think.

Really? Is that really a dumb routine?

Repetitious it certainly is, but dumb it is not. The fact is, it always produces a result that gets something into her stomach which is more than you can say for some companies who have perished in the last few years. So whilst the actions in themselves might be ill-advised, the continuity and persistence requires a closer look.

Innovation, we are always being told, is the stuff of survival. I agree – to a point. New ideas that solve problems or create some life improvement are indeed a fabulous feature of our evolution as humans and of our evolution as humans in commerce. However, one shortcoming of our appetite for innovation is that it leads us to keep switching approaches – sometimes with catastrophic consequences. We rarely, it seems, test anything new for long enough to discover the upsides that follow the opportunity costs.

Consequently, many strategic directions set by company boards and governments are ever worked through properly, often because the initiative is either not an instant crowd pleaser or because it simply entails steady, consistent, tedious-yet-skilful repetition. The consequence is almost permanent upheaval as change is introduced and then dropped and replaced by another strategy. So every time a change is about to bed in and perhaps yield some progress, someone comes along with another ‘good idea’. The result is no progress but tiring upheaval, unsettled teams and individuals who cease to apply themselves to anything because they can be pretty confident that their efforts will be redirected before they have had time to become fruitful.

“We’ve tried everything” the leaders utter. “Yes!” comes the reply – “everything except sticking to the plan!”

But how long should one stick to the plan that is costing time and money and yielding nothing? Is it not true that some strategies really should be abandoned as quickly as possible because they were bad from the outset?

“Yes!” comes the reply, now at a shout, “so stop coming up with the stupid stuff!”

So what does the dumb doggy say? She says: “keep it simple and keep it up”. And then she goes to bed.

So you managed to escape from thinking about work over Christmas and the New Year – well, almost.

Well done you!

Now you just have to muster the will to engineer the reverse exercise. This is when you find out whether you are, what some people refer to as, a ’self-starter’. The magic property which enables you to get on with it all by yourself.

Me? I completely failed to start learning to touch type and I am now having to resort to the loser’s tool of choice: the New Year’s Resolution. My current excuse for five-finger-typing-whilst-watching-the-keyboard-and-still-misspelling-every-third-word is that my friend Tom who promised me a superb, ‘best in class’ book on the topic has not delivered, and frankly, until he can, I’m stuck. Job done. No need to continue with that one.

Part of the problem for me of course is that there’s no one giving me stress about my productivity; I just type, work and play at my own pace. I turn up to work when I feel like it and stop when I like. But, alas, like any company owner/diligent employee, I do far too little skiving/goofing off/resting. I don’t take breaks much, I often forget to have lunch, consider train journeys to be golden times to work on things and have to make conscious and specific efforts to stop having ‘brilliant ideas’ at weekends. But then, I’m lucky. Very, very lucky. I really like my job. So the most damaging aspect of not having a constant boss (I have as many transient ones as I have clients) is that when it comes to something that isn’t important to me, or at least important/urgent enough, I delay or just drop it from the list. So, I seem to have it taped. Lucky me. Well not quite actually. My self-starter approach has come with a high price: there are many things that I just haven’t stretched myself to do. I could say that I haven’t, until now, been very brave and so have played things rather safely. Here is where mentors come along.

I, like everyone else, need someone sometimes to chivvy me along; to help me to get into a difficult, higher gear. Some people depend on their manager to help more than others in this respect either because of the way they are or because of the circumstances in which they live and work. Many of us would show up to work only reluctantly if things were going wrong at home or if work was getting on top of us; repetitious or stressful jobs exact a personal toll which I can only guess at. In these circumstances we positively need leadership. And people who want to be stars at anything (think: athlete, ace pilot, politician, top academic etc.) also need some sort of leadership or at least people around them who perform elements of leadership on them – even when not requested.

We need to know there is someone there looking out for us, giving us an outlet for discussing work-based problems and the occasional home-side catastrophe. We also need someone to give us feedback (a nudge, or stronger) when we are about to take a backward step. So some of us need a leader to get us out of bed, others need one so that they can excel and still others need a leader for self-preservation: because of what the job takes out of them.

So what do we need this precious leader to provide us with under any of these circumstances?

Many things, but a few critical ones are:

1. Set the vision and communicate it to us
2. Determine direction and strategy and pass it on
3. Facilitate progress – make it as easy as possible
4. Provide consequences

Were you expecting number 4?

If you stumble across a poor performing team or a place where morale really stinks it will almost certainly be because there are few consequences to either good performance or poor.

Just reflect upon how you feel when you’ve done something really difficult and no one says anything.

How does it feel, when a little while later, someone fails to do something or gets it wrong (the notion of ‘fault’ is not relevant here) and there is no response, no consequence?

Even those of us who profess to be utterly self-sufficient and to not require formal leadership need consequences to our own actions if we want to get anywhere special. And we want to see consequences for those around us whose actions affect us.

Without consequences events and outcomes just don’t make sense. Fulfilment is never achieved, the will to improve or alter something doesn’t materialise within us. The worst consequence of the lack of consequences is that we give up trying because, when things are really difficult, anything bearable will do. The consequences provide the point. No consequences; no point.

So, I still can’t type and it’s a big waste of time and energy; I get tired and frustrated. I get documents done but without the satisfaction of doing it quickly. I waste brain power on doing corrections instead of using it to be creative, to write better. So the lack of external consequence for me not learning to type, far from freeing me up to remain a free agent, binds me to a situation I don’t like. It’s not big, but then again, it is a bloody pain. My only hope is that Dr Bill Baker will call me to embarrass me about his virtuoso Ukulele playing. At lunch, a few weeks ago, the deal struck between us was: “you learn to play and I learn to type”.

So what does all this mean to you and your team?

You might give them 1-3 as above and much besides. But if you don’t provide consequences for good and poor performance they will never, ever perform anywhere near their best, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, they may give a lot less than that because they will assume that it really doesn’t matter to you. And if it doesn’t matter to you, they will find a way to cope: making it not matter to themselves (cognitive dissonance).

So what are you going to do about it? That is up to you.

What am I going to do? Well, since my boss refuses to administer any consequences of note, I’m going to call Bill and get myself a consequence that I care about: his good opinion. That should nail it.

It will be interesting to see if you can actually stop working when the moment comes.

Let’s be honest now. You and I have struggled to keep going the last couple of weeks; a mixture of fatigue (why now?? see last post), social and environmental hypnotic suggestion (twinkly Christmas effect – technical term) and a raft of business reasons have made it very tricky to keep the productivity machine from stalling altogether. But the day is approaching when we are actually going to have to stop ourselves checking our various electronic devices for updates, actions and trouble; we are going to need to divert our attentions to our own, personal lives. But like a sick dog who isn’t permitted to eat but habitually sniffs it’s bowl anyway, we will both, you and I, have to find ways stop sniffing the empty work bowl for 10 days.

Habit is one thing and wish is quite another. A habit can dry up quite quickly, in the space of 40-50 experiences, even quite close together. So if you do glance at your Blackberry or iPhone and then realise that there is no real need, you may not have to go through this ritual many times before you notice that you are doing it less and less within a day or two. The point here is not so much can I stop the habit but do I have something better (more engaging) to do? Something that brings me a stronger (nicer) feeling than the little kick that I get from checking my mail/voicemail to see if I have received good news or a lack of bad. That part is of course a matter of personal choice. We can each choose to fill our heads with what is happening right now or to worry about what we left behind (unfinished tasks and troubles) and what is coming up next on the 3rd of January (more tasks and trouble).

The challenge for busy people is to exist in the present whilst creating outcomes for the future; to do what we are supposed to be doing now and not what we were supposed to be doing yesterday or what we should be doing tomorrow. Whenever you have decided to stop work, your new ‘To-do’ is to work at doing the present well – keeping your head in the now as the saying goes.

This thing about concentrating on living the day, the experience, the moment is the most obvious recipe for returning to work as happy and rested as possible. Not to mention the most obvious way to ensure that you have something to give, beyond your physical presence to the people around you during the few days that you have at your disposal.

Bottom line: just as you and I can choose how, when and how well to work, we can choose to make a really fine job of switching off and having a great holiday season – even if we must at first work at it.

My best wishes.

How do you feel about the approaching festive season? Are Christmas and the New Year brick walls on the approaching horizon that inevitably block your business path as people just stop making decisions or are they just lines in the snow that you can cross without breaking your stride – and time to join in with the childish fun?

It’s just a short break.

The Christmas phenomenon is theoretically simply a 10-day hiatus when everyone takes holiday at the same time. It is a brief period in the calendar when it is difficult to get any sort of financial transaction done here in the UK beyond paying the bin man his Boxing Day bonus. Actually, now that I think of it, even that is difficult since our corruption-paranoid council is in the habit of rotating the collection teams. It must have solved a problem, I wonder which one?

Waste collection aside, the period in question is actually really rather small – much shorter than the summer shut down with its huge penumbra that seems to extend for months. But Christmas day, small and neat as it is, reduces our keenness for action like a black hole swallowing up everything in the 4-week vicinity of its dark centre. The festive phenomenon is an indiscriminate magnet for everything to do with making progress in business: focus, energy, plans, determination, money, attention span, resources and even good health. All seem to vanish into the void of Christmas without trace or explanation. What is going on, year after year? Should we not be told?

Back to childhood?

Could it simply be that our collective wish to forget all our problems and have fun is to blame? Maybe the twinkling lights and toy advertisements on TV rake up past demons who must be appeased with childish attention. Could it be that the twinkliness of Christmas, like the tortured call of the ice cream van’s crazy music, still has the power to make our collective pulses race? To hypnotise us? To make us forget what we are supposed to be doing as rational adults? Might it be that the daily reminders of the approach of the festive season unrelentingly chip away at our will to execute on business strategy, to be active in sales and marketing, to maintain business rigour and all the other things that we must do to keep our organisations up there, out there and growing.

Christmas seems to act upon our common sense to the degree that ‘sense’ becomes as uncommon as a perfectly roasted turkey. And yet I think the dimension of the festive season that really sends us beyond the fringes of reason is the notion of ‘The New Year’.

A new and better place? I think not.

We are annually taken over by the belief, at a profound, pre-conscious level that everything on the other side will be different and, more catastrophically, is a long, long way off. We start to foster irrational thoughts of new beginnings, fresh starts and clean slates. A new bright world where we can stride out and achieve the unachievable. Conversely, people with targets, having had their counters reset to zero and their quotas increased must face the nail-biting prospect of starting from scratch. But is there really any relationship between either of these two positions and reality? Don’t be daft.

The solemn reality that we must face is that Tuesday 3^rd of January, will be like any other day. The third of January does not know that it is the first day of our business year, 2012. The universe, in keeping the world spinning and the stars evenly spaced around us does not take into account our puny notions of time and relativity. It will, in the starkest reality, be a day like any other except for in one, essential way: how we feel about it.

Our feelings about the day, the preceding weeks, and about the weeks that follow will dictate how we fare: whether we overcome obstacles, if we meet our targets, the degree to which we feel fine, stressed or ill. The degree to which we are taken in by the idea that Christmas and New Year are a genuinely significant existential watershed will determine what we do now and in turn affect what happens around us in 6½ weeks’ time, and far beyond. At the risk of sounding like a Harry Potter film character, you and I shape events in the future by how we act now. You and I can actually change our destinies. How? Mainly, by not allowing our good sense and adult judgment to be sucked into the nonsensical black hole of the approaching holiday season.

Easily said, but how? By asking ourselves 1 simple question every time, in the next few weeks, that we are about to make, or postpone, a notable decision:

If it was 1^st September today,

what would I decide to do?

If your answer is substantially different to what you had decided to do when you factored in that you only had 28 working days left until Christmas, go and splash cold water on your face and think again.

The markers that we use to shape time, events like New Year’s Eve, a flotation date or the financial year end do indeed help us to make sense of what we have achieved and what’s coming next. And yet these same markers can also make us suckers for acting with only the instant result in mind.

Reckoning our objectives and achievements against days, weeks, months and quarters encourages us to go for only the most obvious goals, to shoot for the nearest horizons. Of course, chopping up our years into seasons and holidays does provide us with rest time and relief from our problems and fatiguing work but it also prevents us from having a really good go at things, from taking the long view, from tackling big problems with cooler, calmer minds.

Surrender but not yet.

And if there is one thing that we need as we hurtle towards the coming festive black hole it’s a cool, calm mind that will prompt appropriate action and not wait for the perfect day that will never come.

And yet, as the magic days draw close, their attraction will be too strong for you and I to resist. And then, for a few days, it will be time to surrender ourselves.  Because the part of you and me that will enjoy Christmas and New Year the most will not be the sensible adult who runs a business, but the child inside who chases ice cream vans and still believes that anything is possible.

My favourite shop is in the high street of the nearby town of Crabbs Cross. Teague’s Televisions doesn’t sell televisions, it repairs them.

Repairs them? But no one repairs things any more, surely. And a television? Actually, Mr Teague has also overhauled for me a favourite 25-year old Kenwood mixer and a Raclette machine that used to make all the lights go out when you switched it on. Teague’s Televisions is a small shop, full of used and occasionally decrepit electrical goods waiting for careful repair or collection by a grateful owner. The smell of dust and solder flux hangs in the air – it’s the smell of effort and of careful repairs.

All this in stark contrast to the constant upgrades and improvements, the throw-away-and-replace mentality which we practise, and are exposed to, in every sphere of our lives. Every time I buy a toothbrush it has more bristles, of more colours and of more textures than the one I was able to buy 2 months before (I have a soft spot for new toothbrushes). And try buying a bar of normal, uncomplicated chocolate, in a hurry. You’ll be faced with myriad bars of all shapes that involve chocolate mixed with 20 other ingredients. Somewhere in there you may see a bar that has only been mixed with chocolate – if you’re lucky.

Children at school now have something called Forest School. About 3 years ago someone in Westminster decided that school subjects were just too boring to be taught as they were or that our children were just too lacking in attention spans to be able to cope with didactic teaching methods that had worked well for 250 years. So now our children are taught in a draughty canvas shelter in a field, 100 metres from the school building. Something about team work has been mentioned… Neither of my children, or any of the teachers, has ever been able to explain how teaching maths and English in the middle of a field works better that teaching it in the classroom.

It seems that we just can’t leave things alone or at least that we are allergic to the thought of keeping it simple and applying a little more effort. If you believe in the ideas around Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you could be forgiven for thinking that we have recently shot out of the top of the pyramid, zooming past the self-actualisation zone without a pause, onwards and higher, to the hitherto unknown: fiddle-about-and-make-things-complicated-so-that-we-don’t-have-to-deal-with-what-we-don’t-like zone.

Well, I suppose we solution-providers have played our part in feeding this hunger for the effortless solution. We have been furnishing a seemingly endless stream of ever more intriguing and comprehensive ideas, models, theories and solutions to whoever shouted for help. Solutions to things that may not have needed a new solution at all but just the original one re-applied, more consistently, more carefully, for longer. I suspect that sayings such as ’persistence pays off’ and ’if it sounds too good to be true, it is’ have a greater potential to nudge us in a constructive direction than have many serious books by clever business authors and assorted gurus.

But whilst tiny gems of wisdom such as these are quick to bring to mind, they are even easier to dismiss. And although simple they require an amount of personal investment to make them real. And it can be at this stage of personal investment that we fall. We are frail creatures, we want things to be fixed so that we can get on – with as little effort as possible. We like our solutions on a plate, not in a recipe book.

Going for the big, complicated, branded solution is the ideal meal on a plate. It looks fresh, it looks substantial and it costs enough to be good. There is little room in this thinking for the simple solution. The fact is, the simple solution is a bit embarrassing, at least in part, because it negates all that time and money that we wasted on the complicated stuff that we’ve just tried. But worse, it takes away the hiding places; no complexity and learning curve to shelter behind. Simple solutions are a tough sell not only because they lack the ‘wow’ factor but because they require immediate action which entails personal effort and even individual discomfort. And yet, self-generated improvements are like toys that don’t need batteries. There’s nothing to run out and there’s nothing to say that you can’t fix them when one of the little wheels falls off. It’s the solution you’ve always wanted and it was in your pocket all along. You know what you need to do: think ‘simple’.

What are you waiting for? Close your laptop and fix something.

At about 7.20 every morning I take our two Deerhounds for a run. They are brother and sister, very large and easy to care for. They love running but they love snoozing and generally lying about even more. The only problem is their coats. Cross a sheep with a grey wire scouring pad and you begin to get the picture – and the problem.

Actually there is another problem – Milo and fizz hate being brushed. In fact all deerhounds hate it (it’s an insult to their dignity) unless you give them cheese to eat at the same time and that can become expensive given how much brushing is involved. The fact is that most owners simply don’t bother unless they plan to show. And since showing involves giving up your life and that of your family, liquidating your assets, giving up work and buying a gypsy caravan to take you round the country for 6 months of every year, most deerhound owners don’t show – well not us sane ones anyway.

Back to the coat.

It takes about an hour and a half to groom a Deerhound that has been left a little too long. It takes about an hour to groom a deerhound once a month. It takes about a minute to groom a Deerhound once a day. In that light I could say that Fizz and Milo embody the dos and don’ts of maintaining relationships and intimate communication. By intimate I not only mean the conversations that we have within our most personal relationships but to those that we can have with colleagues with whom we have developed what we might call a special relationship. A situation which enables either person to raise even awkward topics so openly and honestly that there is very little risk of the input being met with anything more obstructive than moderate awkwardness (a red face or a bit of fidgeting!).

The ritual of brushing the dogs daily (I actually stroke them at the same time to take their minds off the wiry brush), whether I perceive that I have the time or not, works on many levels. (Incidentally, this morning I swore that I did not have time and yet still brushed for two minutes. Was I late for my first appointment? No, of course I wasn’t – it was only two minutes).

After two weeks of the daily campaign:

1. The hounds look great.
2. Milo and Fizz are staring to like being brushed – or at least to dislike it less.
3. I don’t berate myself multiple times a day for not brushing the dogs.
4. I feel proud every time I see them because I am caring for them properly.
5. I appreciate them and their presence more; they now receive more attention, through the day, than ever before.
6. They seem to respond to a call to heal even more quickly than before.
7. I have stopped making promises that I know I will not/cannot back-up – “I really will brush you properly this weekend…”
8. Lots of minute and apparently insignificant efforts (positive and negative) stack up remarkably quickly.
9. I have realised that there are a great many tiny things that I can do to make life go better for me and for others.

Most of us, by the time we attain a certain age, will claim to be competent at conducting positive, deep, relationships and performing all of the skills that are required to stay ‘in relationship’ with the people around us more widely. But the point is not whether we know what it takes, it is whether we do what it takes. Do we really behave as if we mean to make progress with the people we spend time with, professionally and personally? Or do we tend to operate on the literal, factual level with them, trusting against all logic and experience, that the relationship will simply look after itself, and even improve over time – just like the coat on a large, shaggy dog?

There is no one that I see in sessions or any group that we are working with who is happy with their workload. People who leave the office at a ‘normal’ time are a rarety – dare I say it – even a tad unpopular? But who’s got it right here? People who leave the office to have a life outside or the ones who stay to apply extra effort? As the old saying goes: “we all start out with the same number of hours in the day…” The more interesting question may therefore be not about when we should leave the office but about what should we be doing in the time that we’re there?

Here are 6 experiments to have a go at. Exercises that when repeated and absorbed into your routine may well ensure that you get the RIGHT stuff done and have a life too.

1. List – not by priority but by nice/nasty level.

Most time management schemes are too left brained – too logical. You and I need to address the root of why we don’t get things done. The drivers. Here’s the big one: there are some things I just find boring, difficult, worrying – all of these states are stress inducing and because I have a brain wired to avoid pain, that is exactly what I do. So, identify things by ‘stressiness’ rather than priority or importance and then make a conscious decision about how to tackle the nasty stuff.

2. Clear that desk.

Take a look at your desk right now. Are you happy to look at it? Does the sight make you groan or make you calm? If you don’t believe me that stuff that you have in your field of vision makes a difference to productivity by affecting your feelings, do The Pledge exercise. Get a can of, you guessed it – Pledge (or similar premium surface cleaner) and a brand new duster. Now take everything off your desk and give it a good dust. Now sit down at your desk and only put only the things you really need to do your job. That’s what it can look like. Notice how it feels and decide which desk state you prefer then keep it that way.

3. Turn off the sounds.

The Email ‘ding’ is one of the most powerful distractions. Like dogs we respond to the noises like hungry Beagles waiting for the pellet of dried food to hit our bowls. When I hear my phone or my Mac signal the arrival of an email everything else is, well, less engaging for that moment. It’s like hearing the letterbox rattling. It’s always a bill – but I still go and have a look to see if it is something interesting. Turn the sounds off for a day and watch the difference in your behaviour – especially your concentration and stress levels.

4. Lunch – eat it.

It’s not just important from a nutritional standpoint. It’s an important way of:

1. maintaining perspective,
2. giving yourself the mental break – and thus having better ideas a few minutes later
3. physical change of attitude – back, legs, neck

5. Be more focussed when tasks compete!

The problem is often that all the jobs tumble around in our heads and the moment when we resolve to apply ourselves to one of them the others pop into our conscious thoughts. We notice an email, a piece of paper peeking from a file on our desk. Or a worry intrudes: a face flashes across our minds and we switch track – again. Get the competition out of your head and onto paper where you can see it – here’s how to do it. Draw two crossed lines at right angles to each other.

Give a title to each of the four segments according to what you have going around in your head. If there are more than four competing areas of thinking, add more lines. Now go back to the task you are trying to get on with. Each time your mind drifts to one of the other areas scribble down the thought in a couple of words and then return to your task. You will notice that the tumble dryer of your mind stops going round once you have taken the clothes out of it.

6. Don’t sweat over problems – adopt the 10-minute rule.

We waste a lot of time combining tasks involving creativity, processing, collation, prioritisation, recording and communication. When we combine we complicate the rhythm of the task making it take longer and more effort to complete. So here’s the procedure with tasks requiring different skills or modes:

1. Split them up and focus on doing one type of thing at a time.
2. Be conscious about which bit you are doing i.e. “now I’m going to just have ideas,” “now I’m just doing layout,” “now I’m just editing,” “now I’m just phoning” and so on.
3. Set mini time limits (10/20 minute chunks) – you will contravene them occasionally but you will at least know that you have control of your time and your energy.

Do any one of these for a week and see what a difference it makes. But before you do, decide what you are going to do with the time that you free up. Giving up one time waster to make room for another will make you think that you have gone to a lot of trouble for no net profit – and you’ll be right.

What does your life look like these days? Open your diary now and look at what’s in it for next week. Meetings? A few? How many? And how many will get added next week. I am hoping that in the next few lines I will get you thinking (and maybe even make you sufficiently gloomy/fed up) about how you spend your time to want to do something about it – especially with regard to meetings and how you handle that whole bit of business life.

How bad is it?

The nice people at Doodle.com reckon admistrators/PAs spend at least 5 hours a week arranging and re-arranging meetings for us to go and sit it – an eighth of their working week. The New York Times, a little while back, reported that men in the U.S spend on average 4.3 hours a week in meetings whilst women spend 2.3 – half what men do. Maybe I should have hired a woman to write this article? The same paper also reported, at the time, that of the people surveyed, 75% said that their meetings could be more effective. At the time of going to press the report suggested that 91 million US workers spent between one and eight hours in meetings each week. Wait for it… 11% reported surviving an astonishing 13+ hours a week in meetings. Is that you too?

What is your meeting schedule telling you?

Get hold of a piece of paper right now, draw a big circle on it and in this order, very quickly plot the slices of the pie according to time spend – don’t dwell – do it quickly.

1. Meetings
2. Supervising and managing people
3. Communicating and winning support
4. Organising and documenting thoughts
5. Thinking

I’ll bet the ‘Thinking’ bit is squeezed in. Why don’t we think more? Perhaps because it looks like we’re not doing anything? Perhaps because we accept silly amounts of tasks? A web time management website I visited suggested that its clients should devote a full 5 minutes a day to planning. 5 minutes?! I am aghast. Tell me that you are too.

So, why go to a meeting at all?

I think that there are only two valid reasons for committing to a meeting: to get value or to give it. Here are all the others:

• To stay in the loop
• To keep control of something
• To manage perceptions (I am interested, involved, a leader, omnipresent, I am working hard, I belong… add your own)

Magic Pennies (or ‘how to handle a meeting request)

So, you get your meeting request/demand/threat. Do this before you reach for your PDA or smartphone. Print off the next page and get 5 coins out of your purse or pocket. If you are getting this Bulletin in text form just go to http://www.pec.org.uk and download the page there.

Now allocate your 5 coins with the appropriate weighting in each of the four unshaded boxes. Now count up the coins and there’s your decision.

• Play the game whenever you get invited to a meeting. Never play it for more than 10 seconds for each meeting. The real answer will come quickly – everything you do after that is probably false justification.
• Do not email a refusal – call or walk to the meeting owner’s desk – it’s still quicker than going to the meeting.
• DO NOT APOLOGISE. They will be confused about your motivations. Explain that you are happy to help but not to meet. Ask for the agenda and for what the person would like your brief input on.

Adding value without being there

You’ve refused the meeting. Well done. Now, assuming they’re still talking to you you need to do the following:

• Get the agenda
• Ask the meeting owner what their priorities are (you may already know this because you may have refused on the basis of a conversation with them – even better.

Now pretend you had intended to go to the meeting but got stuck in a snow drift/sand dune/ (stay with me on this) and your mobile phone only has enough power for a text or 60 seconds of talk (it’s an iPhone 3 with iPhone 4 software loaded). What would you say? To help you decide bear in mind that your input will stand the greatest chance of being used if your representative feels comfortable about sharing your it. So, whatever you transmit to them it should:

• Be absolutely pertinent
• Add your input with a genuinely positive intention and in genuinely positive wording
• Be brief
• Obviously benefit the other people at the meeting (and least of all you)

Conclusions

1. Go to the meeting for a good reason. 2. Stay away for a good reason. 3. Add value and no one will ever chase you one way or the other (well, not for long). Recognise that avoiding meetings is not being lazy – it’s actually harder than following the crowd because you can’t hide behind looking busy. By reducing the number of meetings you attend you are saying: Look at me, I’m not playing the game and I am still delivering value. You are saying: I refuse to waste my time. You are saying: Look at my output not at how much or little I had to work to produce it.

Good luck with swimming against the tide. Grease up and get going!