When you’re on your deathbed, you’re never going to say you wish you’d attended more meetings. But at work, meetings are a necessary evil.

The key to an efficient meeting is a strong leader. Their job is to keep things on track, not be afraid to cut off long-winded discussions, and be willing to end things early once the business is done. Brief and well-run meetings create an organizational culture of respect for everyone’s time.

Read the complete article.

Think about it.

An economy slows down and heads towards a recession.

Why?

Because we stop spending due to a fear of losing our jobs and livelihood…  Jobs are lost because we stop spending. You see the cycle?

A recession is just an illusion that we create out of fear feed to us by media speculation and the doom and gloom they paint.

Maybe it’s time we stop taking all this garbage and start taking control of our lives.

Below is a short text that I recently came across written by Dr. Joe Vitale.  He was one of the teachers featured in the book/movie The Secret.

Stop paying attention to the media.

Stop paying attention to the doom and gloom of anyone and everyone around. Stop getting sucked into being a victim.

STOP IT.

You won’t go anywhere buying into the cultural trance that there isn’t enough and times are tough.

You won’t accomplish your big goals, or do anything of real greatness, as long as you give in to outer circumstances.

You have to take back your power.

You have to take back your control.

You have to “awaken.”

Recently I told a woman who was interviewing me that I was homeless and in poverty only as long as I stayed stuck in survival “thinking.”

As soon as I put my mind on what I “wanted” to have instead, I began to shift and get better results.

This can happen for you, too. It took me ten years. You can do it in one weekend.

But you have to stop listening to the media paint a picture of darkness.

The media paints it by finding something dark to report on, whether it’s true or not. You and others listen to it, believe it, and before you know it, you have “created” what the media painted.

They predict a recession before there actually is one.

But people believe the media, fall into fear, stop spending, and suddenly a recession is here.

This has to stop. And it can stop right now.

Break free from money worries.

Break free from job worries.

Break free from health worries.

Break free from love worries.

Break free — PERIOD.

Before you accept or schedule a meeting, ask yourself; is this meeting really necessary? If it gets canceled by any means, would that meeting fade away, or could it be taken care of with an e-mail, or, would it in fact prove to have genuine value?

“When you take care of your life, do you develop overcomplicated processes for getting things done? Do you spend your free time coming up with systems and programs for buying birthday presents or making dinner or feeding the dog? Do you have regular family meetings to discuss whether or not people are doing heir chores, what the status of those chores is, and what kind of outcomes those chores are expected to achieve?

Why do we spend so much of our business life talking about the business we need to take care of rather than simply taking care of it?”
-From Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It

Some believe, including myself, the solution is in a ROWE.

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. The old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In a traditional work environment, the coworker who gets in early, leaves late, attends every meeting possible and is an avid buzzword user looks like they’re a superstar. In a ROWE, they’re just making a choice about when, where and how they work.

For all you managers out there; praise the outcomes, not the behavior.
Stop praising/admiring people for their “dedication” and start
praising people for what they accomplish.

Stop and think about the following:

1) We rush to work everyday and then spend the first hour at our desk reading the paper and drinking coffee?

2) If you’re done with your work for the day at 4pm, why do you have to stay that extra hour and pretend to be busy?

3) Why do we assume that time = productivity instead of talking about the kind of results the person is actually getting?