Let’s try an experiment: Think of a really interesting non-fiction book you read a year or so ago. Maybe a Malcolm Gladwell or an Anthony Beevor? Are you thinking about it? Good. Now, think of how you would explain the key points of the book to a friend.

Is it difficult? Probably. If you’re anything like most people, you probably only have a sketchy memory of the most high-level idea of the book (which is pretty much what you had when you first picked it up) as well as one completely useless, out-of-context fact (did you know that Breznev commissioned a factory to make buttons so he could have his own American-style denim jacket?). Most of us read non-fiction to learn something about the topic, but pick up astonishingly little lasting knowledge. Why is this?

The key to making information stick is to make it personally valuable. In high school, most of us were forced to study something completely uninteresting (“The Laffer curve, anyone? Anyone?”), so we know how excruciatingly difficult it is to actually learn anything when you have no stake in what you’re reading.

The solution to this is simple: Every time you pick up a book or an article, you need to pose the WIIFM-question, i.e. “What’s in it for me?” The author has, naturally enough, composed the text based on what he/she thinks is relevant, but if you want any of it to stick in your mind, you need to read it focusing on what YOU think is important. This not only motivates you but makes the information more personally relevant thus easier to retain. In addition to WIIFM, another good tactic comes straight from high school: highlight the most insightful statements and key messages. This not only focuses your attention on them, but also turns mere passive reading into active learning, thus strengthening the memory in your mind (for further reading, we recommend Eric Jensen: Brain-based learning).

Reading with a focus on WIIFM and a highlighter in hand carries three key benefits:

1. You’re reading becomes faster and more efficient as you automatically focus on the parts that are interesting for you.
2. Since you’re reading with your own interests and background acutely in mind, you integrate the key points in the text automatically with your existing knowledge, drawing connections and spotting interdependencies with things you already know.
3. Many authors seem to write their text with the lowest common denominator of the audience in mind: any novel concepts or ideas are repeated several times so even the simplest reader won’t accidentally sprain his/her brain. This means that re-reading a book becomes very time-consuming, since repetition means many more pages.  Using our method, the highlighted text automatically forms a great executive summary which you can refer to at a later point, taking just a few minutes to remind yourself what the main takeaways of the book without having to slog through the entire text. This can really boost your long-term memory of the topic.

How to get started:

• The next time you start reading a non-fiction book, think about why you are reading it and how you hope to use what you learn.
• Use a highlighter to mark the key points from your perspective. The goal is not to paint the whole book neon green (although imagine how great that would look), but to only highlight parts which you think you will seriously need later.
• Consider jotting down additional ideas as notes in the margin of the book or in a note-book. Some people prefer first reading with a highlighter only, then re-reading the highlighted parts a few days later while making notes. See which technique works for you.
• Permanently lock the information in your head by repeating it. In its simplest form, this means you review your summary after 1 day, 1 week and 1 month of reading the book, and thereafter annually. If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s not. You’ve already invested a lot of time into the first pass, so the additional trouble of spending a few minutes every year reviewing the information is really a bargain.

Good luck and good summaries!

Catbert: “That’s how I know I won the meeting.”

Pointless meetings have become the scourge of modern office life, depriving companies of valuable working time and people of valuable will to live. They are the knee-jerk response to any challenge we face at work: Whether the office needs re-decorating or the coffee machine has broken down, the response is always the same: “Let’s hold a meeting, start the projector and invite everyone!”

This doctrine results in an overwhelming amount of meetings, which usually are so poorly administered they don’t even achieve whatever they’re meant to, resulting in yet more meetings. It’s like the mythological Hydra, only instead of chopping off its heads, you drink mineral water and lukewarm coffee while listening to a debate about what kind of plants the new office-decor should feature. This can be excruciating if you have a deadline breathing down your neck, since as Peter Drucker points out in his book The Effective Executive, “one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”

From the perspective of the invitee, the best solution is often to avoid going in the first place. As Leo Babauta points out in his great book The Power of Less, you should always ask people if they really need you for a meeting. If they say yes, ask if you couldn’t give your input via email, via telephone, or in a 1:1 talk. Or maybe they only need you for 10 minutes during that 4-hour meeting, so how about you only show up to give input during that slot? Another good tip is to say that your schedule is still unclear, but you’ll see if you can make it. Unless you’re in a pivotal role, this will allow you to play it by ear on the day of the meeting depending on your workload.

Looking at it from the other side of the table, what if you want to hold a meeting yourself? After all, you forfeit the right to gripe about pointless meetings if you’re part of the problem! Much has been written on the nuisances of typical meetings, so ignorance is no excuse either. What are some of the classic mistakes you want to avoid?

• Inviting people who don’t really need to attend.
• Not having attendees prepare for the meeting.
• Not enforcing a strict timetable/agenda for the meeting.
• Not communicating what the meeting is for.
• Letting the conversation veer off topic or allowing the discussion to become disorganized.
• Not ensuring that all opinions are voiced.

Even though everyone knows about these issues, they’re prevalent in almost any office on the planet. One study showed that of workers who attend meetings on a weekly basis, 75% felt that the meetings were ineffective to some degree! So what are the main things you can do to make sure your meetings are as brief and effective as possible? Three clear focus-areas can be identified.

1.    Structure

• Keep the meeting as short as possible, never longer than an hour. If you plan a meeting that’s more than 3 hours, do the courteous thing and also bring razorblades so people can end their own misery.
• Create an agenda where every item has a defined and binding amount of time you can use for it.
• Let everybody know in advance, what goals and decisions need to be reached in this meeting. If you want to foster pointless discussion, host a book-club instead.
• Send out the agenda well-ahead (at least a week before the meeting), and let people know if they need to prepare for the meeting. Be strict but realistic here. Emphasize that not preparing is a waste of everyone’s time, but don’t send out a 500-slide deck and demand that everyone read it.
• Every meeting needs a chairman/woman who’s responsible for keeping the meeting on schedule. This is probably you, since you called the meeting, but resist the temptation to buy a gavel (although it would come in handy).

2.    Communication

• Make sure you invite only the right people, keeping the group as small as possible. Before sending an invite, always ask yourself: “Does this person really have to attend?”
• The chairman needs to take control of the discussion, letting people know when the subject/agenda-item changes. If the attendees want to discuss something unrelated to the topic at hand, ask them to schedule a different meeting.
• Make sure everybody has a chance to voice their opinions. The primary strength of the meeting vis-à-vis working individually comes from the diversity of views and opinions, so don’t let the discussion be dominated by one or two voices only! If necessary ask people to give their opinions in written form or vote anonymously.

3.    Action-orientation

• Meetings are meant for making decisions and finding solutions, not for ranting, griping or dwelling unnecessarily on problems. Keep the discussion solution-oriented and leave the grandstanding for the company xmas-party.
• Always make sure, every agenda item ends with a decision and clear to-dos including responsible people and dead-lines.

Finally, if you’re working on a large, interconnected and complex project, it may be worth holding staff-wide SCRUM-meetings e.g. in the mornings. SCRUM-meetings are held standing up and everyone has about 30 seconds to explain what they’ve done the day before, what they plan to do during the day and whether or not they’ve hit any stumbling blocks. No discussion is allowed during the meeting, it just gives everyone an overall picture of the project. Scheduling it early is also a good way of making sure everyone shows up on time.

For better or worse, email was built on the concept of regular mail, so it shares a lot of characteristics with sending letters and opening mailboxes. Google tried to revamp this with Google Wave, but it seems people prefer their emails to work like regular mails. Thus when it comes to identifying maladaptive email-habits, sometimes it makes sense to ask yourself: “Would this behavior make sense for snail-mail?” Let’s check out two examples:

• Checking your inbox 100 times a day. If you had a fancy, windmill-shaped mailbox just outside your house, would you run out to it in your satin bathrobe and slippers every 10 minutes to see if something new had arrived? Hopefully not. Yet in the case of emails, people check their inboxes like they got a heroine-fix out of it: “Oh, I have an extra two seconds while this website loads, I’ll just check my inbox again.” And yes, regular mail only comes once a day vis-à-vis the constant flux of email, but these kinds of interruptions really kill productivity, as you have to arduously shift your attention from one thing to the next.
• Letting messages fester in your inbox. Say you’re prancing down to your mailbox by the curb for the 27^th time that day and find that there’s an urgent, action-demanding letter there: “Last day to protest before your house is demolished to make way for a new highway” or something along those lines. Would you simply leave the note in your mailbox, thinking you’ll take care of it later? Probably not. Rather, you’d remove it from the mailbox and put it in your to-do pile or on the fridge. Yet in the case of email, we have no qualms about letting stuff just sit in the inbox, cluttering it up while we put off dealing with it.

Neither of these behaviors makes much sense in the case of snail-mail nor email. So how do we revamp these time-honored habits into something useful?

• Instead of checking your emails every five minutes, or worse yet, reacting to pop-up windows telling you about new messages, decide to open your email program only twice a day, once at lunch and once before leaving work. Of course some messages really are hyper-urgent, but hey, that’s what phones are for! If you foresee people trying to contact you urgently, make sure they have your phone number, or else expect to see an email like: “You haven’t replied in 2 hours, so I’ve had you declared dead, sold your house and married your widow”. Read more details in our post on email-discipline, it can seriously double the amount of focused work you get done in any given day.
• Tattoo this on your knuckles so you see it whenever you reach for your mouse: “An inbox is for incoming messages only.” It’s as simple as that. Your inbox is not a note-book, it’s not a to-do list and it’s not a file-vault. It’s a highly temporary storage place for stuff you haven’t seen yet, so you need to have clear and fast protocols for incoming stuff:
  • If an email asks for an immediate response, then give one in the shortest form possible. For more on this, check out our post on writing awesome emails.
  • If an email asks for non-urgent action, note it down in your to-do list or book time in your calendar to deal with it.
  • If an email is useful information meant for you, process it (i.e. read it, taking notes if necessary).
  • If it’s not for you, forward it to who it should have gone to (with the appropriate note of explanation), or reply to the sender asking why you received it.
  • Once you’ve dealt with a message, get it out of your inbox! Create relevant folders labeled by project (“Work”, “Private”, “Moscow Academy of Mime-Artists”), and move your messages there so you maintain a record of all your correspondence.
  • Last but not least: never leave the office without a clean inbox. Letting mails linger in your inbox overnight is the beginning of a very slippery slope, which ends in total email chaos. Also, you owe it to your morning self to have hacked through the inbox before leaving.

As an extra tip: consider creating a few “batch” folders for items that are neither urgent nor important, like congratulating Auntie Mae on her prize winning begonias at the county-fair. The idea is that you can safely let these low-priority messages accumulate for a few days before investing half an hour to deal with all of them at once. You might even consider setting up an auto-filter to direct messages from certain senders to the folder, though naturally not Auntie Mae, otherwise you would miss all those insider trading tips.

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Have you ever thought carefully about why you go to the gym? Maybe you like the way you look leaning against a treadmill? Maybe your goal is to be able to burst the buttons off your shirt just by flexing your pecs? Or maybe you just want to be able to open that jar of peanut-butter without having an aneurism or collapsing into a pile of sobbing human-refuse? Whatever the reason, we’re not here to judge, but we would like to point out that the time you invest into even a modest workout regime is actually quite substantial. Say you’ve been working out twice a week for the past decade, and a round-trip to the gym takes about two hours. This means that you’ve already spent almost three months at the gym, non-stop, 24 hours a day! For most people, the results might not justify this amount of time, and hence any method to cut down on it and use it more efficiently would be more than welcome.

The concept of High Intensity Training (HIT) is ideal for those wishing to maximize results while minimizing time spent at the gym.With HIT, you only need to spend 30-40 minutes at the gym each week. Basically, it rests on the following premises:

1. Whereas most people do several sets of the same exercise, with HIT you only do one set of such intensity that you’re completely spent. Using a single set of 5-8 reps with as much weight as possible has been shown to be one of the best predictors for muscle growth and strength.
2. Since you push yourself to the brink with every individual exercise, it logically follows that you will be pretty wiped by the end of the workout. So much so in fact, that it will take you at least three days to recover. This period is critical for muscle growth, so you actually only should work out only once or twice a week.
3. Lots of modern, fancy gym-equipment aims at isolating muscles so you can better direct your work-out. This is actually something professional bodybuilders use to their advantage, since they want to meticulously control the exact appearance of their bodies. If you think about it though, this is not a natural way of working out. Both today and in the stone-age, whenever people exert themselves in everyday situations, they rarely use just one muscle. It’s hard to imagine there’s ever been a situation where one more bicep-curl made the difference between life and death (except of course that time when you were hanging from a helicopter with one arm and had to use the other to lift that heavy briefcase of nuclear launch-codes on board). HIT purposefully aims at engaging large groups of muscles at a time, spreading the exertion and the benefit.

Here’s how you get going:

• Find a training-partner. The work-outs are going to be so intense, you will be happy to have someone help you up the stairs to the dressing room afterwards.
• Find yourself 4-6 exercises which involve large muscle-groups (like bench-presses, squats, pull-ups, dead-lifts, dips or press-ups). There’s a ton of workout regimes online, which you could also use. As always when working with weights, technique is vital so you don’t injure yourself. Consider taking one or two classes with a trainer from your gym to make sure you’re executing the movements properly.
• Warm-up before you start your work-out, by e.g. rowing 500 meters like your life depended on it.
• For every exercise, do one very slow set with about half your training weight to warm-up the muscles needed. Nothing kills motivation like a pulled muscle.
• Do one very slow set of about 5-8 repetitions until your muscles are not working anymore. Have your partner help you to do another 1-2 repetitions.
• Finish every workout by stretching and relaxing.

Note: If you’re new to High Intensity Training, you should start slow and only get at the total-exhaustion training after a few weeks of moderate exercise. Once you’ve started on HIT, listen to your body carefully. If you’re sick, stay away from the gym. Muscles don’t disappear overnight, sometimes a few weeks of rest can even lead to some surprisingly accelerated progress afterwards.

Like it or not, email has become one of the most important communication tools in our lives, both at home and especially at work. Pictures of kittens, videos of drunken escapades, chain-letters about blind, one-legged orphans tied to elephants and sometimes actually relevant messages can be sent with the touch of a button. According to the Radicati Group around 30 billion emails (plus, and this is not a joke, another 290 billion of spam) are sent every day. This can be a little overwhelming, and if you feel like you’re at the mercy of your inbox rather than in control of it, we suggest you read our article on good email use.

The fact that it has become ubiquitous so quickly means that proper email protocol is barely followed. If you spend most of your day reading and composing emails, this can quickly become infuriating, as most people won’t even pause for a second before clicking send. Some classic email-gaffes include:

• Forwarding a message or link accompanied with the note “FYI” or “You should read this”. In most cases this means the sender has felt the title of the document is peripherally related to what you are doing and for some reason thinks that they are being helpful by flogging whatever garbage they stumble upon onto you.
• CC’ing people whom the email does not concern at all for the purpose of “keeping them in the loop”. Often this is just an attempt to disseminate responsibility to a large group of people, but in reality it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.
• Marking everything urgent and/or overusing CAPITAL LETTERS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!! Avoid at all costs unless you’re trying to entice people to invest in your Nigerian oil-scam.
• Writing James Joyce stream-of-consciousness monologues in your message, hoping the reader will be able to parse together the fragments of your psychotic verbal-vomit.
• Using non-descriptive titles so that the recipient has to slog through the entire email to understand what you want.

But let’s say you’re writing an email with content other than “Look, what the internet gave me: a picture of a dog wearing a hat!” How should you compose it to maximize the impact while being considerate of the recipient? Here are the most important aspects you need to consider:

Who are you writing to? Who really needs this information and who should address it? Don’t CC people unless it’s vital that they partake in the conversation. Bombarding people with stuff they don’t need to read is not only inconsiderate, but will make it harder for you to get anyone’s attention when you actually do need to reach them (remember the boy who cried “wolf”).

What’s the subject of your message? This is by far the most important part of the entire email. At best, a poorly chosen subject-line is inconsiderate to the recipient since he or she will not know how to prioritize your message, and at worst it can mean your message goes completely unread.

1. Ideally, the subject should already convey the most important message of your email, a bit like a top-level summary.
2. Remember, only one topic per email. Rather than writing a long message with a throng of topics, send several short messages. Five short questions will likely get five short answers quickly, whereas a long, meandering enquiry will be put on a to do-list.
3. Does your email require action from the recipients? Then start your topic with “Action required…“, so people know it can’t just be ignored.

What are you trying to say? Keep in mind that emails are not supposed to be built like mystery novels, where the reader has to be kept in suspense till the very end before finding out who did it. You want to give all your conclusions upfront. Use the pyramid principle to make your mails as impactful as possible.

1. Keep your emails as brief as possible, some people even recommend a five-sentence limit. Often long emails are just a sign that the sender has not bothered to distill his or her thoughts into a coherent message, leaving it up to the reader to decipher the ramblings.
2. If your message requires people to take action, express this clearly and individually to all the recipients, explaining what you want and when you need it, i.e. “John, I need your data by close-of-business today.”
3. Always consider the possibility that someone may forward your message to new recipients. For this purpose, use lingo that can be understood by everyone, but more importantly, ensure your message is one you would not be ashamed of even if it leaked for the whole world to see. A counter-example would be describing your business strategy as a “blitzkrieg”.

Should you be sending an email? Emails can be a great tool for conveying information, but not for all purposes.

1. If you need information urgently (within hours), then pick up the phone. Remember, emails are for non-urgent business only, and you can’t be pissed at someone if they take 24 hours to respond to a message, no matter how many exclamation marks you put in it.
2. Are you upset? Then don’t write an email. Messages sent in the heat of the moment might make for fun reading when they’re circulating online, but are probably best contemplated for a day or so and then delivered in person or over the phone if still relevant. After all, that 5 AM message to your boss peppered with suggestions of multiple personality disorders and comparisons to various bodily fluids will be less amusing on Monday morning. If you want to express something emotional, use the phone or book a face-to-face meeting.

Following these few simple rules will hopefully generate the same amount of consideration from others when messaging you, and who knows, one day we might eradicate all crappy emails from the planet!

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