The value is in the summary

You know how we zone out in meetings, get overloaded, lose focus and do other things? (We check our devices for email, social media, anything to relieve the pressure of information overload.)

What do you do to counter this situation? Most people I work with initially blame the phone or device and say things like ‘put them away’ or ‘don’t use them’.

But it’s less about the phone, more about what’s going on in our heads.

Information overload is a daily, even an hourly challenge. And most of us don’t know how to cope.

It’s called 'cognitive load coping' and we haven’t learned how to do it. So we reach for our dopamine device as relief.

Rather than punishing the person reaching for their device, make the processing of all of this information easier.

There’s are more than 32 techniques I teach in cognitive load coping.

Here’s one to use often : SUMMARY. As you go through a meeting, summarise where things are up to, what’s been done, what’s yet to do. Summarise the facts, the evidence, the opinions, the key points, the proposed solutions and the discussions so far. A summary takes little more than a minute. Less. And we don’t use them nearly enough.

End 'all-talk' meetings

Travelling on a Melbourne tram yesterday, I was riding past a business office not far from where I live. One of the company's meeting rooms faces the street, so I always look in as we pass by to see what they're doing in their meetings.

Of the many, many times I've gone past, they seem to always be:

- sitting at the table,

- looking at each other,

- talking at or with each other.

A fairly standard meeting. I call it an 'all-talk' meeting. They're not looking at anything; just each other.

Sure, eye contact and connection is important but meetings that are all-talk are worse in terms of productivity, engagement, clarity and decision-making.

If a 'common point of visual context' was used - a visual something... anything for them to look at - productivity would peak! A visual on the wall, a whiteboard, a flip chart, heck use the window!

When we're making sense of information and all we use is each other, we miss out on the opportunity to find and build commonality.

Meetings give us information overload; then we go for relief, distraction ...and we switch off.

Shift your meetings from 'all talk' by adding 'some visual'. It's plenty better!

How we confuse ourselves

In a meeting recently I saw a colleague write up more than 5 pages of notes. The next day they said how confused they felt about it all.

What were all the notes about then?

Sometimes we can capture content others are delivering, thinking we’re doing well, getting all of that information down. But it can end up meaning nothing to us later. We don’t seem to be able to find what the key points were or what the essence of it was.

As I chatted with my colleague later and we reviewed their notes, they were words, phrases, things underlined. These were the key things they heard. But later, none of it really made much sense. There was no synthesis, distilling, connections or conclusions. The notes were parts of sentences.

In sensemaking, it helps to pause, listen, make sense of what’s going on, and write that down. It is habit (and fear) that drives us to write it all down like a court reporter! But we don’t need to write it all.

So make sense as you go, capture information as it makes sense to you.

Go for distilling information rather than transcribing it!

The cost of distraction

Checking your phone during a meeting is a productivity, focus and attention killer.

We think we can be present in the meeting AND scroll, check and read … but no.

Our IQ drops and we develop ‘attentional blindness’.

We lose the ability to judge what information is valuable or important. It’s probably why we think some speakers deliver boring segments, meetings have boring parts or workshops have boring sections. But shock, horror… it may not be boring it all!

It’s possible our ability to make sense has been interrupted. What others deem important ...we don’t. Then it switches over; they check their phone and get distracted, and we’re paying attention. We notice the important things; they don’t.

Whenever you’re trying to get ‘alignment’ or make sure everyone is ‘on the same page’, make a point of having mobile devices out of sight.

Focus, attention, IQ and cognition will be better, stronger and the work will be achieved quicker.

If you're going to check anything, check who’s distracted and who’s focused on the work at hand. 

The cost of waffle

In the battle for people’s attention, why do we waffle?

🔆 Did we run out of time to read and edit?

🔆 Do we think more words sound smarter, clever, impressive?

🔆 Do we feel our idea or content is ‘weak’ and so more words might bolster it?

Waffle, jargon and filler is wasteful. Visually in a report or document, it looks like too much hard work to read. Our eyes tire and our brains are exhausted from working through slabs of wordy text.

Long sentences lose people.

If it’s too much hard work, your audience will go into cognitive overload and they'll distract (or rescue) themselves, looking away, disengaging and disconnecting. Keep it clear, clean, as many words as needed. No filler.

Q: What does wordy waffle do to you?