Changing Bad Habits At Work

In response to my post this morning Identify Bad Habits And Replace Them With Good Ones @NigelBarron tweeted some of the worst habits that we have at work.  Conference calls, Email and PowerPoint.  I’ve certainly worked to change some of these so I thought I would explore what I’ve done.

I’ve pretty much eliminated all routine conference calls from my life.  Instead I just read the status reports and highlight reports, write a comprehensive highlight report myself and write blog posts.  I don’t think I miss much.  It’s not that conference calls are inherently bad, used well they can be an amazing productivity boost, but they have made us lazy and have fragmented accountability.

I have dramatically reduced my emails, in part by unsubscribing every day for the last month, but also by sending a weekly highlight report and by encouraging other people and projects to do the same.  Also writing a blog helps as well.  I get a lot of questions sent to me and I frequently answer by sending links to blog posts or collections of blog posts.

For some purposes I like PowerPoint, but it can dramatically constrain a discussion so I like to use A3 pads of paper for small team discussions or a whiteboard for larger groups.  When I do use PowerPoint I like to create a hyperlinked navigation structure that lets me jump around in a way that follows the discussion and use a pen to sketch on the slides or on blank slides as needed.

I’m wondering how other people have changed their bad habits and thinking that I need to write a more detailed post of the conference call soon.

The picture above is of the new ‘grass’ benches at my beloved Beach Terrace Cafe, which is now on twitter @beachcafefylde and Facebook.  This is my view as I’m writing this post