Here are the second five of my ten top tips for making your communication shorter:
- KEEP/BIN/APPENDIX – a great tip for presentations: when you’ve created your content, review each bit of it, asking yourself “is this so critical I need to KEEP it? If it isn’t, can I put it in the BIN? Or, if some of it is useful background, should I move it to an APPENDIX?” This is quick way to shorten it – because much of it ends in an APPENDIX. Or the BIN!
- Fewer items on meeting agendas – this one is obvious. Shorten your agendas. Anything that isn’t needed… well, isn’t needed. So remove it.
- Fewer attendees – the more people in a meeting, the harder it is to reach consensus. So only invite the people who need to be there – decision makers and subject specialists. Everyone else who you might have invited… just email them the “actions arising” afterwards.
- Stop pointless stuff – many communications just aren’t needed – monthly reports that no-one reads; weekly update meetings that could happen every fortnight, etc. So, with all your communications that you hate the most, ask yourself “would it do any harm if we stopped this?” And if it wouldn’t do any harm… stop it!
- Swap “updates” for “BEST/NEXT/HELP” – in your update meetings, give everyone this brief – “you have 30 seconds maximum to tell us the BEST thing you achieved since our last meeting; your #1 priority for NEXT week; and the one thing you most need HELP with”. After everyone has done their 30-second summary, you have a quick chat to learn from each other’s BESTs, align on the NEXTs, and give each other the HELP you need. You now have a punchy 20-minute actions-causing chat, instead of a tedious one-hour boredom-causing history lesson.
So these are my top ten. Which ones would you add to this list?
Action Point
Spend less time communicating!
Choose all of the above that will save you the most time …
And then do them.