Can you avoid unnecessary meetings?

How many times have you attended a meeting that didn’t seem to serve a purpose? A meeting where you didn’t need to be there? Or a meeting that was badly organised and just went on forever?

I’ve been to a few like that. Avoid wasting your time. Here are some ways to maximise the value of meetings.

Ask if you need to be there.

Do this in advance of the meeting. Why have you been invited? What will you be able to contribute? Is it essential that you attend the meeting or could you simply provide information in an email?

Some people may go on about encouraging face to face or at least verbal communication as opposed to email. But for very detailed information, especially technical documents, it can be a lot easier to provide the information in an email.

Get an agenda.

Every meeting should have an agenda. If not, there’s a risk that it will meander and take much longer than it needs to. An agenda is good because it clearly shows the subjects that will be discussed, and with timescales the chairperson can ensure that discussions stick to the schedule.

Prepare in advance.

Sometimes you won’t know exactly what will be said until the meeting starts. But it helps to have some idea. If you can prepare, the meeting will be that much easier. Otherwise, you’ll just end up saying “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” and half of the discussions become follow-up actions. By then, perhaps a meeting wasn’t even needed.

Bring a pen and some paper.

Always expect to write something down. It’s better to bring a pen and some paper and not write anything, than not bring them and wish you had.

Don’t overdo it.

Some people think it’s best to say something so you don’t appear to be “dead wood”. This is all very well if you have something to say, but saying something that doesn’t need to be said can be far more damaging than keeping quiet. Talking too much, especially if the discussion goes way off-topic, can be a very bad idea as it can make a meeting go on for a lot longer than it needs to. Stick to the subject at hand where possible.

Review your progress.

After the meeting, look back and see if you really did need to be involved, and whether the discussion could have been handled any differently. Give feedback to the chairperson if you have any suggestions for improving future meetings of a similar nature.

Those are my suggestions - do you have any tips for maximising the value of meetings? Can you remember your best and worst meetings? What made them so extreme?

Is this how you feel when you leave work, or do you take the stress with you?

Stress is not uncommon in a job, but failing to deal with it effectively can have a serious impact on your life.

I recently quit my position as an administrator for Entrecard, citing stress as the main reason. It was an unpaid role and I volunteered many hours of my time to deal with support queries. However, it was a highly busy job and some of the queries were extremely difficult to deal with.

At the start, I found myself helping out in a number of areas. I frequently offered to take on more work and did everything I could to make a difference. People appreciated the help. All was good.

However, as time progressed, I realised that other things were not getting done. Writing music, coding Injader, updating my blogs, these were all things that I enjoyed doing and somehow I just wasn’t finding the time to do them. Then I noticed that the Entrecard position was getting harder to do.

Between my day job and my volunteer work for Entrecard, I had very little time for anything else. Before, I would work on my own projects from time to time, which helped me to de-stress. At the time I didn’t realise that this was my way of de-stressing. It was only when I didn’t have time for my own projects anymore that things started to go bad.

Without warning, things suddenly got very tough for me. I was massively stressed out, unhappy, and I was making mistakes. The stress levels were simply too much for me to deal with, I lost focus of my goals, and a lot of things ground to a halt. This blog was one of those things, my music was another.

I knew that something had to give. So, I resigned my position at Entrecard, refocused my blogging priorities, and set up a new blog - Top Ten Blog Tips. I finally closed the doors on my blog at benbarden.com, and started to get my life back.

There are a few things I have learned from this experience.

1. Your life should have a realistic balance between work goals and personal goals. Not everyone enjoys their job, but even if you enjoy every minute of it, don’t overdo it. Otherwise, it’ll soon lose its shine.
2. You can’t de-stress if you take on too much. Watch out for the warning signs and consider making some changes if your life hits a serious downturn. Make time for your own activities no matter how demanding your work needs may be.
3. If things get to be too much, resist the urge to make a rash decision to get a “quick fix”. It may give you some relief, but it may not be the best way to approach the situation and it’s far more disruptive if you have to make two changes in quick succession than just the one. Wait until you can review the situation with a clear head, and make a decision then.

Sometimes we only seem to learn from our mistakes, but don’t ignore the warning signs. Thankfully, I did take action fairly early on. The main thing to remember is that you need to maintain a sensible balance to ensure things don’t get out of control.

That’s my view - how do you de-stress?

Temporary work aside, I have only had two jobs. Well, I’ve only worked for two companies - I had a few different roles at the first company.

I started as an administrator for an insurance company way back in July 1997. I went permanent in January 1998, before transferring into the IT department as a trainee developer in December 1998. So while I was still working for the same company, I guess you could call that my second job.

I was a trainee developer, then a junior developer, then a developer. In October 2004 I took a new career path and became a Senior Test Coordinator, specialising in software testing. Perhaps you could call that my 3rd job. In 2006 I became the Testing & Environments Leader - basically a Team Leader position, and an expansion of my previous role - but I chose to leave the company in September 2006 when my wife and I emigrated from the UK to Australia.

In all I worked for that company for over 9 years. It was an office job. There were a few hundred staff in the building, and there were a few other offices around the UK.

In October 2006 I started working for a small software company, and for the first few weeks this was based in an office in Sydney. There are major differences. For a start, the company is a lot smaller. We specialise in software instead of just having some software that’s required for the business to function. Our customers are external and frequently phone for support, whereas at my last job we only updated our software for the staff within the company. And of course, it’s in Australia, so the country has a range of differences compared to the UK. It’s pretty much a complete opposite.

From December 2006, my wife and I moved house (we both work for the same company) and started working from home. To cut costs we eventually closed the Sydney office and now all of us work from home.

Having moved from an office job to a fully home-based job, I fully appreciate what working from home is like, and I know what working in an office is like, too. There are plenty of advantages and disadvantages.

The whole point of this blog is to explain what working from home is really like. I’d like to provide some tips as well so you can enjoy working from home as much as I do. As I write more posts for this blog, you will probably notice I am generally very positive about working from home, but that doesn’t mean it works for everyone nor does it mean I’ve never had a bad day.

So, to get the ball rolling - do you currently work from home? Have you ever worked from home? If you haven’t, would you like to? If you already do, what do you think of it?