Scott Belsky is a compelling speaker. When I heard him at an organizing conference earlier this year, I was so impressed with him — and with what he had to say — that I briefly thought about trying to get a job at his company, Behance. That's an idea that didn't happen, for many reasons — but when I read through my notes from his talk a few days ago, I decided to get his book and learn more.



Belsky is concerned with helping "creative professionals" — the ones who have lots of ideas — bring those ideas to fruition. His book talks about the three important components in doing that:



1. Organization and execution.

2. The forces of community.

3. Leadership capability.



While all three sections have great ideas, I'm going to focus on just the first one: organization and execution.



Sometimes this section reminded me of David Allen and his book, Getting Things Done — even the book titles have a similar ring. But there are plenty of differences, too. And some items reminded me of the things I learned in my corporate days.



The way Belsky recommends we handle organization and execution is what he calls the Action Method, which "begins with the simple premise that everything is a project." A project could be the kinds of things you might think about: preparing a major presentation, for example, or doing your taxes. But there are also projects like "the stuff you do to advance your career" which become a "career development" project.



And each project has three primary components: Action Steps, References, and Backburner Items.



Action Steps are "the specific, concrete tasks that move you forward: redraft and send the memo, post the blog entry, pay the electricity bill, etc." We need a way to capture these anywhere they happen: at the office, surely, but also "when you are reading an article, taking a shower, daydreaming, or getting ready for bed."



Each Action Step "must be owned by a single person" because "an unowned Action Step will never be taken." This was a familiar idea to me, but what was new to me was Belsky's insistence that we not have one person take notes of all the Action Steps agreed to in a meeting, and send them around. "Each person needs to 'own' their Action Steps," he says. "When tasks are written in your own handwriting, in your own idiom, they remain familiar and are more likely to be executed." He also notes that "Some teams take a few minutes at the end of every meeting to go around the table and allow each person to recite the Action Steps that he or she captured. Doing so will almost always reveal a missed Action Step or a duplication on two people's lists."



Given that we're dealing with the Action Method, it's not surprising that Belsky says: "Taking and organizing extensive notes aren't worth the effort. We have found that notes are seldom used and can actually get in the way of capturing and following up on Action Steps."



Which brings us to References — all those things you may want to refer back to that are not actionable: handouts, manuals, web sites, etc. Belsky says many of us were trained back in our early school years to write everything down, and now have well-developed habits of doing so — but that for many of us "this habit of recording and organizing everything has become a time- and space-consuming behavior with no real payoff." Furthermore, "the more energy you spend on scribbling down notes, the more liable you are to miss the opportunity to capture valuable Action Steps."



Belsky provides suggestions for easy ways to store the References we keep. But he says we should ask ourselves "For what purpose would I refer back to this at some point?" — and if we can't think of anything, there's no need to keep it.



And then there are Backburner Items — the "things that are not actionable now but may be someday" — which reminded me of David Allen's someday/maybe list. Belsky mentions the need for a "Backburner ritual" to "periodically revisit and curate the Backburner as time goes on" and he suggests doing this monthly. Some items will become Action Steps, some will have become irrelevant and can be eliminated, and others will stay on the Backburner.



Belsky also dives into prioritization, recommending that we place all our projects on an Energy Line "according to how much energy they should receive." His sample line has five categories: extreme, high, medium, low and idle. At first, there's often a tendency to put too many items on the extreme end of the line; doing this exercise may force us to make tough decisions. "Energy is a finite resource that is seldom managed well," Belsky says, and going through the Energy Line exercise can help.



There's much more in this section, including many ideas about processing your email and the notes you take during the day, and many ideas about making the most of meetings. ("Most meetings are fruitless," he says.) Belsky quotes Seth Godin on the importance of shipping — getting your product, whatever it might be, out the door — and Jesse Rothstein on the importance of follow-up. There's also a mention of the importance of selecting good tools; Belsky says, "The aesthetics of the tools you use to make ideas happen matter."



As you can tell from how long I've nattered on here, I found a lot of worthwhile ideas in this book; I'm glad I read it. Now I need to go distill the Action Steps and Backburner Items I'm taking away from my reading; the book itself is my Reference, and it's one I'm going to keep.

I won’t attend meetings with no agenda. And I encourage everyone else not to do it, either. Waste of everyone’s time. And in case it’s not clear, “so that everyone can catch up on what’s happening” is not an agenda. -- Margaret Lukens, New Leaf + Company

One of the many things I learned in my years at HP and Agilent Technologies was the importance of a meeting agenda and meeting minutes - minutes that captured any decisions made, and any action items assigned. (Action items = corporate-speak for to-dos.) Those action items always had a name next to them, and a due date. There was also a section in the minutes called "parking lot" - for those items that came up in the meeting that weren't part of the agenda, but which we wanted to remember to address at another time.

So I was pleased to read Margaret's comments back in October 2010 - because now, long out of the corporate world, I'd found myself attending some meetings that didn't have agendas, and Margaret's words reminded me that this was a poor use of my time.

Margaret and I aren't the only ones who are pretty vehement on this subject. Here's Eric Matson of Fast Company; the "Schrage" he quotes is author and consultant Michael Schrage:

Get serious about agendas and store distractions in a "parking lot." It's the starting point for all advice on productive meetings: stick to the agenda. But it's hard to stick to an agenda that doesn't exist, and most meetings in most companies are decidedly agenda-free. "In the real world," says Schrage, "agendas are about as rare as the white rhino."

Next, here's Michael Doyle in his book How to Make Meetings Work!:

We can't emphasize enough: Everyone should know what to expect before coming to a meeting. ... If all participants receive a detailed agenda at least a day (preferably a week) before the meeting, they will come prepared.

And just today Seth Godin had a wonderful blog post - go read the whole thing, it's short - on what the ideal "meeting fairie" would do, including:

Ensuring that every meeting has a clearly defined purpose, and accomplishes that purpose, then ends.

Issuing a follow up memo to everyone who attended the meeting, clearly delineating who came and what was decided.

If anyone would like a template (a Microsoft Word .doc file, or a PDF) for a meeting agenda and minutes, send me your e-mail address and I'll be glad to send my template along to you. Then just customize it to meet your own needs!

[photo by Kalsau, found on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons]

Are two monitors really better than one? Someone asked me that recently - and the answer seems to be yes. (A single monitor that's very wide has the same benefits.)

I knew programmers liked the dual-monitor set-up, but I never quite understood how it could help a wide range of users until I read an article in the New York Times, where the author talks about two benefits. [Note: Registration may be required to read New York Times articles.]

1. Keeping your primary task in front of you, even when you go off to check e-mail or perform some other secondary task. As author Farhad Manjoo says:

Now I could keep my e-mail and the Web open on one screen while my Microsoft Word document ran on another. This kept me on task. Even if I did go off to the Web, my document was always visible, beckoning me to come back to work.

2. Making it easier to work with two applications at once. Again, quoting Manjoo:

As I’m writing this story in Word, I’m switching back to my text editor to search for pertinent data. When I find that information, I select it, copy it and switch back to Word to paste it. ... In a multimonitor setup, the brain rests easy: My notes now sit on one side of the dual screen while my Word document sits on the other. When I focus on one program, I don’t lose my place in the other.

In an earlier New York Times article, Ivan Berger provides more examples of how a dual-monitor set-up helped him, including this one:

When I work on tables or spreadsheets, I can see all the columns at once.

And there's research to back up the anecdotal evidence, too. As the New York Times points out:

Researchers at the University of Utah recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations. They found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text-editing operations than people using a single 18-inch monitor.

[Note: The other party in the study was NEC Display Solutions, which obviously would hope to see such results.]

Some research from Microsoft back in 2003 also showed significant increase in productivity from using a larger display area.

As one person said in a discussion of the University of Utah/NEC study:

I don't claim you can't do things almost as well with a single monitor. But once you've used a dual, you'll never go back.

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