How to Reduce Administrative Burdens

Anyone else suffer from meeting overload? It’s a big deal. Simply put too many meetings means less time available for actual work, plus constantly attending meetings can be mentally draining, and often they simply are not required to accomplish the agenda items. At the same time sometimes it’s unavoidable. No matter where you are in your career, here are a few ways that I tackle this topic so that I can be my best and hold myself accountable to how my time is spent. I take 15 minutes every Friday to look at the week ahead and what is on my calendar. I follow these tips to ensure what is on the calendar should be and that I’m prepared. It ensures that I have a relevant and focused communications approach, and enables me to focus on optimizing productivity, outcomes and impact. 1. Review the meeting agenda. If there’s no agenda I send an email asking for one so you know exactly what you need to prepare for, and can ensure your time is correctly prioritized. You may discover you’re actually not the correct person to even attend. If it’s your meeting, set an agenda because accountability goes both ways. 2. Define desired outcomes. What do you want/need from the meeting to enable you to move forward? Be clear about it with participants so you can work collaboratively towards the goal in the time allotted. 3. Confirm you need the meeting. Meetings should be used for difficult or complex discussions, relationship building, and other topics that can get lost in text-based exchanges. A lot of times though we schedule meetings that we don’t actually require a meeting to accomplish the task at hand. Give ourselves and others back time and get the work done without that meeting. 4. Shorten the meeting duration. Can you cut 15 minutes off your meeting? How about 5? I cut 15 minutes off some of my recurring meetings a month ago. That’s 3 hours back in a week I now have to redirect to high impact work. While you’re at it, do you even need all those recurring meetings? It’s never too early for a calendar spring cleaning. 5. Use meetings for discussion topics, not FYIs. I save a lot of time here. We don’t need to speak to go through FYIs (!) 6. Send a pre-read. The best meetings are when we all prepare for a meaningful conversation. If the topic is a meaty one, send a pre-read so participants arrive with a common foundation on the topic and you can all jump straight into the discussion and objectives at hand. 7. Decline a meeting. There’s nothing wrong with declining. Perhaps you’re not the right person to attend, or there is already another team member participating, or you don’t have bandwidth to prepare. Whatever the reason, saying no is ok. What actions do you take to ensure the meetings on your calendar are where you should spend your time? It’s a big topic that we can all benefit from, please share your tips in the comments ⤵️ #careertips #productivity #futureofwork

Time savings from #GenAI are being put to use to do more administrivia. That's amazingly sad. Is #AI helping us automate the right parts of our job? Slack Research found that office workers spend 37% of their day on administrative toil: paperwork, data entry and meaningless meetings. Debbie Lovich and the BCG team found similar: 25% of people's days spent in admin tasks. Unsurprisingly, that's also work that brings the least joy. When asked what people would do with time saved by #AI, the top response was to do more admin work. Many folks have leveraged AI-enabled tools to get better at some of the core of their job. It's great for a "first draft" on a piece of content, or some python code. That helps people in the core of their work. But we've not seen a lot of investment in reducing toil: how do we leverage #GenAI to reduce admin overhead? Here are three ideas: 1️⃣ Summarize meeting outcomes, decisions and next steps so that I don't have to attend a meeting where I'm not critical to the outcome. The challenge Gartner points out is that less than 25% of organizations have transcriptions enabled, which is core to this use case. You can't reduce "FOMO" if you're not willing to invest in transparency. 2️⃣ Make it easier to find the information I need. Various reports from Microsoft and others show that people spend up to an hour daily just trying to find information. It's early days, but the promise of Glean, along with search inside Slack and Microsoft Teams is to be able to have one search that cuts across all of your conversations, documents and tools. 3️⃣ Pull all the fragmented backoffice systems for things like "approvals" into single, streamlined experiences. "I don't want to go from 20 apps from HR, Finance and IT to 20 chatbots" in the words of one #CPO. It's not a pipe dream. Andy White and the team at Salesforce built an Approvals Bot in Slack, which simplifies and streamlines the process for employees every day. What's your take on the ability to get AI to help us reduce the toil of work? 🔗 Read on for Christina Janzer and team's great work: https://lnkd.in/d8c7_ZqH #FutureOfWork #productivity #engagement #research

A few productivity tips for my neuro-sparkly reps out there to help you 5x productivity. While some people view ADHD as a roadblock, I like to think of it as my superpower! As a sales rep, and then manager, I found these 3 tips had outsized results when it came to driving activity, pipeline, and revenue. Feel free to steal them! 1 - Automate all that you can. Busy work sucks, and I have found I put it off if I don’t have systems in place to drive them forward. Whether you use tools, or a VA - find a way to cut down or batch administrative tasks so you can focus on those revenue generating activities. 2 - Templates for everything. One of my favorite things to do is recognize patterns in my workflow, email replies to prospects or customers, or find FAQs and create snippets or templates so I don’t repeat work.   Example: A prospect reaches out and wants a pricing breakdown. I save a snippet in my sales engagement tool (I use Apollo.io) with a summary, attach pricing, and always offer to hop on a call if they want to walk through it live. After writing the same variation of this email a dozen times I realized it should be a snippet. Do this with any recurring messages or replies to FAQs and you can save yourself a ton of time throughout the sales process. 3 - Time block. Warning, you then have to defend those blocks in a big way.  Block… then live by your calendar. Like Ron Burgundy and the teleprompter. Do not go off script! I find batching similar tasks makes work more streamlined. I also try to balance my day by how interesting I find that task and my typical energy levels.  I match not as fun things to my high points, and the more interesting tasks (OR non client-facing low lift tasks) to my lower points so I don't have a low interest and low energy battle go down! #DopamineProblem Any other neuro-sparkly friends have some productivity hacks they want to share? #apollopartner