Monday, to-dos, emails and meetings

Today is Monday and a sunny Monday at that. The mountains are glistening over towards me, and my heart is opening wide.

I have a lot of different items on my to-do list this week and I need to juggle very different projects.

Thanks to technology, this has now become a little easier, as I can constantly rearrange my backlog in Kanban and assign different colours to the different projects and then prioritise them.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a weakness: Emails. I always see them as a Pandora’s box – once opened, the flood is unstoppable. That’s why I often leave them shut. This is also not great and leads to me answering some emails with a slight delay.

I’ve tried all sorts of techniques to work with time units and topic units, but the emails are still a challenge for me.

Another challenge is notification meetings. Why do people do this?

No, that doesn’t contradict my call for fewer emails. I think you can organise important notifications and coordination much better offline than online. For me, meetings are a place where this has no place. It’s about working collaboratively and co-creatively on solutions, having a team experience together, finding out how everyone is doing and consciously utilising the added value of the team over the individual in a purposeful way. And learning something in the process. At least one new thing.

When I support organisations, I almost always have to push for a radical change in the meeting culture. This is often a huge step on the way to an actual cultural change that enables transformation.

Speaking of meetings, that’s exactly where I’m going now.

Have a great week.