Increase Productivity in Your Team with This Simple Rule! Not Today Blog 38

Our daily morning briefings help improve transparency and keep our goals in sight, but I had no idea that introducing one simple rule would increase productivity in our workplace forever.

Tiny Office, Big Problems

Our family business has been through a lot. In 2014, in a tiny office in a shopping centre in Jakarta, we started designing, manufacturing and commissioning large-scale heat transfer systems in Southeast Asia.  To be honest it’s ups and downs to this day. Over the years we’ve been screwed, and we’ve screwed up – the whole spectrum.

I don’t know any other person who can take on so many obstacles and struggles and keep their sanity like my mother. On paper, she is the director of our company, and you would think that she would have enough on her plate with the normal tasks of a director such as developing and implementing business strategies, monitoring financial performance and maintaining company policies and legal requirements. No, she is constantly busy putting out fires, taking care of purchasing and IT tasks, coordinating logistics and helping with sales and marketing.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

Henry David Thoreau

Overlapping Zoom Calls

How do you make time for all that when there’s another meeting every hour? Right, by not holding them. Or something like that.

When the lockdowns started in Jakarta, we were forced to hold online meetings. And that worked surprisingly well. We had daily meetings in the morning where each department reported on their tasks and we went through critical projects.

Since it was a bit of a hassle to coordinate and schedule meetings from home, the well-organised thrived and the less structured lost their bearings. And soon we were back to holding overlapping meetings throughout the day.

It didn’t improve when we were back in the office. It was impossible to establish a proper workflow when you’re interrupted by meetings. That is when my mother came up with a rule that would increase productivity by leaps and bounds.

Internal Meetings till Noon

We agreed to have internal meetings only in the mornings.

It changed everything. Everybody knew that by lunchtime all internal meetings would be over.

Yes, a two- to three-hour meeting marathon can be a bit tiring, but it’s a good trade-off. Suddenly it became easy to schedule phone calls with customers and suppliers. And when there were no external meetings, you had the whole afternoon to focus on work.

It’s not about having enough time, it’s about making enough time.

Rachel Bermingham

Sure, occasionally we have afternoon meetings to put out fires or discuss urgent matters. But we’ve been doing it for the past eight months with no plans to change it any time soon.

Do you need more time to focus? Would a fixed time frame where internal meetings are allowed be a solution to get your time management back on track?

Why not today pitch a similar structure to your colleagues?

D