Meetings overload?

Tired of too much Zoom, Slack and Teams meetings? Here are my thoughts on how you can manage 'meetings overload'

I've been inspired this month by the community I've been building with my friend Christina Kisley around kindness. Last Thursday was the final week of four Zoom calls. To be honest, before I put it out there, I was a bit scared about it: I wondered if anyone would show up... If I'd have anything to say... If it was all a bit too vague... About 25 people showed up, each of them brilliant and wise, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. We called it 'The Kindness Happening' as a way of saying "we're not really sure what this is going to be, but let's get together and talk about kindness". We didn't want to pitch it as a programme or a bunch of workshops or a focus group... turns out it's been all of these things and more.

Graham Allcott 0:04

You're listening to Beyond Busy, the show where we ask the bigger questions about work. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And I have to say like, My throat is absolutely dying. Like I've just had this awful cold all week, I've had a really bad cough. And so what that means for you is there's going to be very little preamble this week, I'm just gonna go straight into the episode, I'm talking to Therese Huston, She is the author of this book, "Let's Talk! Make Effective Feedback your Superpower". And I think this is a really timely and useful book. And there's a couple of studies recently that one that found that 37% of managers dread giving feedback. And another one found that 65% of employees wish their managers gave more feedback. And I've been thinking about this a lot, because as part of The Kindness Happening, one of our challenges for the week was to give kind feedback. And I've realized that it's something that I need to do a lot more than I currently am doing with this whole kind of challenge around it encouraging us to try and give at least four pieces of feedback a day. And I thought that'd be easy, it was surprisingly hard. So I'm going to lay down that challenge for you. We called it the four quarters challenge, I'll put a link in the show notes here to the blog post that I've done about it. But basically get four coins, put them in your left hand pocket or on the left hand, left hand side of your desk. Every time we give feedback throughout the day, move one of those coins to the right hand side. And try and do that every day, give at least four bits of feedback a day and just make it just the norm make it the expectation that this is something that we always do, rather than a thing that we resort to when the work is bad or the work is amazing. But you're giving feedback across that full spectrum. So that's my little challenge to you. And let's get straight into the conversation. So really enjoyed this. Here's my conversation with Therese Huston. Cool, we are rolling. I'm with Therese Huston. How are you?

What's holding you back from doing what you need to be doing this week?

I'm really proud of my little podcast. From its' humble beginnings as a side project in 2016 to its current status as one of the UK's leading business podcasts, with a global audience and weekly marketing campaigns, it's been quite a ride. Here are 10 reflections from the first 100 episodes.

Graham Allcott 0:05

Welcome to Beyond busy, the show where we ask the bigger questions about work.

My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Tom Bergin. Tom is the author of a book called "Free Lunch Thinking". And we talk amongst other things about around cognitive biases, what you can do about them, why economics is broken. And what happens when you when you get screamed at by Donald Trump. So lots to come on this episode. Also, I really enjoyed Tom's book, the inside story of BP, which you talk about as well, which is all about some of the major decisions that BP made around the oil spill a few years ago, and just loads coming up. Tom was a journalist for Reuters and started his career as an energy broker. So loads of loads of interesting stuff on this episode, it was a really fascinating conversation. So I think you're gonna really enjoy it. Just quickly, before we get into the episode, just want to say thanks to everybody who has been messaging after beyond busy 100, our little series of three episodes, we were originally planning to just do one episode, which is like gonna be a compilation and we just had so many things I wanted to fit in, that we ended up doing it all in three parts. So there's a productivity one, there's a work life balance one, and then there's one about happiness and success, which are kind of like three of our sort of core themes really on this podcast. If you haven't checked them out, then there is everybody from you know, Cal Newport to Josie Long to Gerald Ratner. Everything in between just a really interesting array of guests. And it was a really interesting process may be really thankful for this podcast and for everybody who listens, and you know, makes it possible for me to sit in my shed, and just ramble on, I suppose I'd do it if no one listened, to be honest. But it's just really lovely to get that feedback. And also just to sort of spend a bit of time reflecting and looking back, which I know, I don't do enough. So let's talk about Tom Bergin. So he was a journalist at Reuters and before the market crash in 2006, he works as an energy broker, and a fund manager. And then when he moved to London, he started working in journalism, as you're going to hear, wrote this amazing book, the inside story of BP. And then this new book, Free Lunch Thinking where he basically just lifts the lid on economics, and talks about a lot of the kind of theories within economics that are known to be true or kind of, you know, everyone thinks they're true, and just maybe they're not. We talk about Donald Trump and his encounter with the now former US president, it feels very nice to say not to get too political, but it's a relief to not have to listen to Trump, isn't it? So really interesting conversation. And then we start and we finish it at the end, talking about productivity, and his thoughts on productivity as well. So absolutely loads to pack in.

So let's get straight into this Beyond busy 101 with Tom Bergin.

So we're halfway through January already? Time is a tricky master, eh. If you still feel like you haven't fully nailed that whole 'new year, new you' thing, don't worry. I'm here to help.

Because of 'Productivity Ninja', I'm asked a lot about New Years' Resolutions - the best way to think about them, how to make them stick, whether it's all just a nonsense, whether I have some secret 'hack' for them... and so on. The focus of these discussions or articles is almost always on the resolutions themselves, rather than on the implementation. I think this misses the most important bit. How we design and implement new habits is what matters. So, with a couple of ideas from Productivity Ninja and a couple from Charles Duhig's brilliant book, The Power of Habit, here's a few ways to design the habits and behaviours you need to make the changes you want:

People’s Faces — Kae Tempest

It’s coming to pass

My country’s coming apart

The whole thing’s becoming such a bumbling farce

Was that a pivotal historical moment we just went stumbling past?

Well here we are

Dancing in the rumbling dark

So come a little closer

Give me something to grasp

Give me your beautiful, crumbling heart

Graham Allcott 0:04

You're listening to beyond busy, the show where we talk, productivity, work-life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show.

And on this episode, I'm talking to Ben Williams. Ben is a former Royal Marine, served in Afghanistan. He's also a former bouncer. He's also a former drug addict. And we talk about a lot of those experiences in this book. Some of his battle stories from the frontline in Afghanistan in the book are just unreal. We talked about a couple of them, but yeah, really worth checking out it. I kind of read it with my jaw, just dropping it. Every time I turned the page it was, it was pretty amazing. So really interesting book, we had a real mission with this episode. Actually, we just had tech fails on multiple fronts. So I realize I'm using all these military analogies, like on multiple fronts and stuff, and missions. But yeah, we ended up recording the first half of this one day, and then we recorded the second half of it like a week later. And then even when we were in the second half, we recorded that into half. So yeah, thanks, Mark Stedman, my producer for piecing all of this together. And I think when you get into the episode, you might find that you just can't really tell where the joins are, because I think we did a pretty good job of just keeping the conversation going. And we both just listened to the first half before we started. The second bit just to sort of get back in the zone and all that. I think we did a pretty decent job of, of getting a full hour even though the tech was was very much against us. But yeah, so we talked about his time in Afghanistan, his take on commando values, and leadership and performance. We talked about his work with the England football team. We talked about planning, just really lots of good stuff, and also how to sleep at night, which I think if you're probably in war zones, and have experienced things that that must be a really big challenge as well. So lots of really valuable stuff.

In this episode, I think you're gonna really enjoy it. So let's get straight into it. Here's my episode with Ben Williams.

Graham Allcott 0:04

Hello, happy new year. And welcome to the first episode of beyond busy for 2021. This is the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. All the big questions for work and life. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Oliver Burkeman. He's the former Guardian columnist with his column, this column will change your life. He's also the author of a couple of brilliant books, including one of my favorite books, The Antidote, which we're going to talk a little bit about, and seeing as he has probably for his sins, read more self help books than anyone else. I just thought he'd be the perfect first guest for 2021. New Year, new you and all that stuff. Although, yeah, it's a new year, same old shit. Isn't the moment. So? Yeah, if you're tuning in, as this goes out, obviously, we've just gone into this new national lockdown the final straight against COVID-19. Yeah, it feels pretty rough. And I think, certainly I came at Christmas feeling like, okay, when was the holiday thing? When am I supposed to feel better and energized. So if you're feeling like that, I totally feel you. And you're not alone, I'm going to be doing a lot more. I'm going to be really, really trying hard with my Sunday emails rev up for the week, which goes out every Sunday to just really keep your spirits up over the next few weeks. So if you're not signed up to that, just go to Grahamallcott.com. And I'm just putting out a positive or productive idea every Sunday to just get you revved up, and just keep your spirits going in this really difficult period that we're in right now. So first episode for the new year, I'm just getting the office backup to shape and going through some big changes actually in the shed down here at the bottom of my garden, basically turning half of the office into a kind of film set so that I can do so I can record some digital courses. So I can have a really nice background when I'm on zoom calls, and when I'm on webinars and that kind of thing. So yeah, really just kind of embracing the whole, like camera friendly angles, and all that sort of thing. And just putting a bit of thought and design into that. So we're doing that bought lots of film care, which has been a sort of fun, geeky little project. And yeah, we're getting down to some filming over the next few weeks. So excited about that excited just to be back into the sort of day to day work. It's been a few weeks for me to the last couple weeks off before Christmas, and nice to be getting back into things. And also just for us, I want to say thank you if you've bought a copy of how to have the energy, my book with Colette Heneghan, we put an episode out just for Christmas with me and Colette talking about the book, which we'll put a link to in the show notes getbeyondbusy.com. We also put a link in the show notes, obviously to the "How to Have the Energy" book. But yeah, we got off to a really good start with it. Unfortunately, all the book shops are closed now now So yeah, that's not going to be helping our sales. But it's selling pretty well on Amazon. Good rankings on there good reviews on there. And yeah, we're pretty pleased with how we've got off to a good start. So if you haven't bought how to have the energy, please do. These podcasts are free, they'll always be free. We try and keep the advertising and the sponsorship in the plugging to an absolute minimum. And I guess what I'm saying is what i'd love in return is just when I've got a book out, please just go buy the book. That's all I'm asking. So if you get some value from these episodes on a regular basis, then please go to bookshop.org or go to Amazon and buy a copy of how to have the energy that would make me very happy. And please do tag me in it. And let me know on LinkedIn and Instagram that you bought it and that will just help us to spread the word as well. So how to have the energy to buy it. So let's get into this episode's Oliver Burkeman, as I said, if you've not checked out his book, the antidote, it's just really brilliant and really worth a read. And he's someone who really embraces positive thinking, but from a very kind of cynical perspective. So the antidote is happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking, and just really logical and philosophical and I just really enjoyed this conversation so much. So let's get straight into the episode. This was recorded just for Christmas. dandelion on zoom, because Oliver is in the States. So let's get cracking. Here's my conversation with Oliver Burkeman. I'm here with Oliver Burkeman.

Happy New Year. I hope you had a good Christmas. Well, a good one in the circumstances. It felt rather short, didn't it? Which means it's time for the first Rev Up for the Week of 2021. So here are 21 questions designed to help you get clear on what 2021 is capable of bringing.

When I was a kid, my parents went to this evangelical church. Every year at Christmas, my dad would write a quiz called ‘Festive 5ive’ for the church magazine, which would be 5 really hard cryptic questions. It would be things like “SNHN”, which you’d have to guess was ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’.. and so on. Maybe I’ll do that next year, but it felt like no one has the energy for that now. But on the other hand, ‘Festive 5ives’ is such a good title. So here’s my version of ‘Festive 5ives’…

Graham Allcott  00:04

You're listening to beyond busy show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And this is our final episode of 2020. And my special guest is Colette Heneghan.

Colette is the co author with me of the book, How to Have the Energy. So We’ll be talking all things nutrition, we'll be talking about her last year or so of getting very little sleep with young Iris, and just parenthood in general. And we talk a lot about the process of writing this book, which we're really excited to share with you. So How to Have the Energy comes out in the UK on December the 24th. Now, it's actually been brought forward slightly it was due to be the seventh of January, and then we found out that Amazon will bring it forward. And it's also going to be in a few bookshops on the 24th of December already. So you can get it in bookshops, you can get it from bookshop.org If you don't want to buy from Amazon. And we'd love you to preorder it from one of those places so that by the time it comes out, there's a bit of buzz and it's you know, hacking the algorithms and getting up the charts and stuff. So go and preorder your copy of how to have the energy if you are in an area where you're lucky enough to have bookshops open go into a real bookshop and preorder it order it there. And it'll be in those shops from the 24th of December. So check out 'How to Have the Energy'.

And then let's get into the episode.

Here is my conversation with my co author Colette Heneghan.

So a couple of weeks ago here, we talked about winter coping strategies and how I was feeling motivated, ready to hunker down and raring to smash lockdown 2. It was going really well for a while. And then, just as I was feeling I’d finally got this 2020 thing sussed, the wheels spectacularly fell off last weekend.

For no good reason except probably my annual bout of S.A.D., I stopped sleeping. I started to feel disconnected from everything. And then the black dog of full-on depression bit me harder than it has in years. And next thing I know I’m sitting in front of a camera, in a studio two hours from home, with a massive list of videos to film for a course I’m creating… and I’m just completely blank. I’d ignored the warning signs. I kept on going at a hundred miles an hour and then the wheels just fell off.

So I'm with Sir David Omand, he is the author of How Spies Think. He is a former director of GHQ a permanent secretary of the Home Office. He's taught at the Open University. He, you know, really just has had an incredible career and was fascinating to talk to. We didn't quite get around to some stuff at the end, but I wanted to ask them about because he got pulled away to go and do something else. So I'm just going to do a little bit of a wrap up at the end of the podcast as well. But let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Sir David Omand. 

As we’re almost into the final month of this awful year, attention is turning to 2021, and for me that means the launch of my book with nutritionist Colette Heneghan. It’s called How to Have the Energy. The backstory is that I approached Colette to help me increase my energy, both for productivity and mental health reasons and the changes I experienced through our her coaching were so remarkable, that we decided to put it all together in a book.

The idea was it would be a practical book about food and nutrition, for people who didn’t have the time or headspace to make huge sweeping changes. It was released a year ago, with what in hindsight turned out to be a terrible title “Work Fuel”. Needless to say, it didn’t sell very well, mainly because book-sellers weren’t sure what shelf to put it on. But the people who did read it loved it and called it things like “a hidden gem” (which is nice, but y’know, not really the dream of anyone who invests a year of their life into writing a book — we wanted it to reach a huge audience and make a bigger difference), so we figured it was worth a second shot.

You can buy How to Have The Energy from independent book shops here, or get it 50p cheaper from Uncle Jeff here, but you should know that means you’re condoning the fact that he doesn’t pay his taxes.

I guess what was most interesting to me about my journey through nutrition with Colette was that I didn’t need to make massive changes or start intricately weighing proteins to have a huge impact on my energy. In fact, after coaching with Colette, I probably now spend less time actually preparing food than I did before, but more time enjoying food and certainly more time enjoying the energy that food gives me (I no longer get that 4pm energy slump, which I used to ‘treat’ but grabbing a Wispa bar and pouring a stronger coffee- which it turns out, wasn’t an ideal fix).

The parallels with productivity and anything else where you want to change a habit are pretty clear to me. There is no magical app or secret sauce when it comes to doing great work, or Ninja-level productivity. If there was a magic formula though, it would simply be this:

I’ve been thinking about the difference between “wisdom” and “shiny new ideas”. Are you influenced by the LATEST business thinking? Does your bookcase resemble a small branch of Waterstones, with cutting-edge thinking sitting unloved and un-thumbed on the shelf? Do you latch onto the newest trends to see how you can improve as a professional or a leader?

Graham Allcott  00:04

You're listening to Beyond Busy, the show where we talk, productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. All the big questions for work and life. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And my guest this week is Christina Kisley, She is the founder of Kisley and Wild. She's got 30 plus years experience as a coach, as a growth catalyst. And just someone who really understands both business and collaboration and people. And I think you can really enjoy this episode. We are basically using for this episode, the audio from a free webinar that we put on a little while ago. And it was for World Kindness Day. So the topic that we're going to be talking about this week is the productivity of kindness. And this is a topic very close to my heart for reasons which will become more obvious at the end of this episode, I have a very special announcement to make at the end of this episode. So stay tuned right till the end, grab yourself a cup of tea or coffee, or a glass of wine depending on what time of day or evening, you're listening to this. And let's get into the episode, obviously, the wine is if you listen to this in the morning.

So my guest is Christina Kisley and we're talking about the productivity of kindness. And one of the things that I want to plug as part of this is a thing that we're doing together. Over four weeks, in January, we're going to be running together a thing called the Kindness Happening, and it's a limited zoom group, maximum of 40, places for zero places. So pretty small, little group. And the idea is we're going to be talking about kindness at work, kindness and its effect on productivity, and all kinds of stuff around that. So radical honesty, how to give feedback with kindness, you know, really talking about some of the the ways to have difficult conversations at work in a way that's kind and authentic, and really holds that person at the center of the conversation. So this is something that Chris and I have been talking a lot about just behind the scenes for quite a while, and we would love you to join us at the Kindness Happening. So it's happening in January. And the reasons for the Kindness Happening, by the way is that it's not a workshop. And it's not a focus group. It's basically a gathering. So it's bringing people together. Chris and I are gonna lead it. We're gonna have a fair amount of content to, to give to the group at the beginning. But really, it's about who else is in the room. And we've got some great people in the room, including my colleagues from Think Productive, and Hayley Watts and Grace Marshall, both people who've done this podcast before actually Haley's one hasn't gone out yet, but we've recorded it. And we've also got Magnus Wood, who is the founder of The Kindness Consultancy going to be joining us on week one's call and lots of other stuff happening. So it's going to be a really interesting way to reflect on how you deal with people at work. It's hopefully going to give you lots of practical tips and tricks, as well as hopefully just helping to build some momentum and a bit of a movement around this idea of kindness at work and being more human at work. So if that at all sounds interesting, then go to Eventbrite put in The Kindness Happening. And you'll find details and we've tried to keep the ticket price pretty low. And there is a little discount code, which I will give you at the end of this episode as well, with my special announcements. So if you want to do that, go to eventbrite.com and put in The Kindness Happening. And we'll also put a link obviously in the show notes, which is a getbeyondbusy.com and you can just jump straight from there to the Kindness Happening page. So let's get into this episode. This was originally recorded as one of our Think Productive free webinars. We also have some other webinars around the book that I'm releasing in January with Collette Heneghan called How to Have the Energy, all about nutrition and eating well to have good energy for work. If you want to sign up for those, go to thinkproductive.co.uk click on the free webinars tab. Those are happening on the seventh of December the 11th and 16th of December. So free webinars all around nutrition, Colette's a voracious reader of the science of foods and qualified nutritionist. She will have all the answers if you bring your questions to this free webinar. And we'll see you there. So here is last month's free webinar, which is myself and Christina. And we call this the productivity of kindness. I think you're gonna really like it and so let's get into it. Welcome, everybody. It's lovely to have you with us. We got 66 people joining us It's shooting up. And this is a very special, free think productive webinar for World Kindness day. So Happy World Kindness day, we're going to be talking about the productivity of kindness, and why I'm on a bit of a mission to spread kindness, more generally. I'll introduce Christina in a moment. So Chris is a friend and colleague. We've been working together quite a lot over this year, and just has some some incredible perspectives on kindness, I just thought it'd be really good to double check this and introduce you all to Chris and Chris's work. So those of you who don't know me, so I'm Graham Allcott, I'm the founder of Think Productive. And we have for the last decade or so been on this mission to help organizations to make space for what matters. So that is all about helping people to get their inbox to zero, to really think about productivity in a very personal sense. And to help them fix their meetings, I'm probably best known for the book, How to be a Productivity Ninja. And I also have two books coming out next year. So how to fix meetings with my colleague, Katie Watts, and how to have the energy which is all about nutrition and eating well to have the best energy for work, and also have a podcast called Beyond Busy. So if you're not into subscribing to my podcast yet, then go to your podcast app and subscribe to Beyond Busy just had Anne Bowden, the CEO of Starling bank on the podcast yesterday, which was great fun.

And one of the reasons I'm talking about kindness a lot today, and more generally, not just for World Kindness day is that one of Think Productive values, we have five values in the company, and one of them is trust and kindness are rocket fuel. So I'll be talking a little bit later about what that means and how we use that in practice. But let's start just by introducing Chris.